{"product_id":"sun-ra-s-chicago-afrofuturism-and-the-city","title":"Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City","description":"\u003cp\u003eSun Ra (1914-93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Sun Ra's Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth--specifically to the city's South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and launched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism where Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold \"dream-book bibles,\" and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where styles circulated and mashed together in clubs and community dancehalls. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSun Ra drew from a vast array of locally available intellectual and musical sources--from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, rhythm and blues, Latin dance music and the latest pop exotica--to put together a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra's Chicago contends that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city--and that by excavating postwar black experience from inside Sun Ra's South Side milieu we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University Of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50459945140555,"sku":"1103129","price":24.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/4328b373-6710-4003-92df-7266e0206f83_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727228229","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/products\/sun-ra-s-chicago-afrofuturism-and-the-city","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}