Lecture outline,
October 10^th

Reading: Ken Hollings The Solar Myth Approach: Sun Ra, Stockhausen, P-Funk, Hawkwind: the live space ritual≤ (Undercurrents)
View: last angel
View: Art21 Spirituality

The article:

≥In 1962, the future meant outer space, which was still inhabited by the monstrous, brooding terros of the 1950s. However, for two of the most advanced musical minds on the planet ≠ Sun Ra and Karlheinz Stockhausen ≠ it had become a complex, living, glittering entity≤

Stockhausen

http://www.zakros.com/mica/soundart/f02/stockhausen.html

Sun Ra

http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html

Walter Benjamin

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History

Samuel Delany ≠ Dahlgren

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/delany/delany_samuel_r0.html

Film: Last Angel:

http://www.frif.com/new97/the_last_.html

question to consider

Why do you think these futurist themes recur in different genres? What do you make of the thematic linkages between Sun ra and Stockhausen discussed in the article?

Why do you think afrofuturism is most realized in music rather than, for example, writing? Given that he has arguably written one of the great books of the 20^th century, why canπt black science fiction writer Samuel Delaney make a living?

Is science fiction and space myth an effective way to talk about black experiences? (Why) are there different things at stake for different group when they imagine the future in the present?

How do these themes refer to the history of the African diaspora, yet imagine possible futures, futures that enable a broad range of cultural expression and an ever-widening definition of "blackness?"