Espacialidades no cinema

Na fábula utópica Space is the place (John Coney, 1974, EUA) Sun Ra e sua banda Arkestra realizam uma viagem intergaláctica, aportam na Terra, especificamente em Chicago e Oakland (Estados Unidos) e começam seu périplo de recrutamento de pessoas negras para um deslocamento físico e simbólico, com o objetivo de habitar outros territórios. Rodado e lançado no começo dos anos 1970, o filme teve pouca repercussão na época. Posteriormente, com o VHS e DVD, o filme tornou-se cult, passou a ser celebrado entre cinéfilos e críticos e tornou-se um dos ícones do afrofuturismo, termo cunhado por Mark Dery, nos anos 1990, “para tratar das criações artísticas que, por meio da ficção científica, inventam outros futuros para as populações negras atuais”. Retomo esse filme por sua constituição espaço-temporal e seus modos particulares de figuração, que chamam a atenção para articulações sonoro-topológico-mentais que resultam mais que liberdades formais, em modos de apreensão e constituição da imagem e do som, articulando percepções e sensações, em torno da construção dos sentidos do filme.

The (Afro) Future of Henry Box Brown

Henry Box Brown, a Black man born into slavery in the American South, devised an unforeseen yet ingenious plan to achieve emancipation: he was shipped to the North in a cramped, wooden box. The first testament of Brown’s escape was not his emergence from his box, but instead his voice responding to the box’s addressee. Later, Brown reenacts his original escape in Victorian England and becomes “The King of All Mesmerizers” by envisioning an alien future for himself, much like musician and philosopher-poet Sun Ra.

Ben Ngobeni’s cosmo-dramas of the Afrofuture

The print series entitled Bridge of the Spirits (2017) by visual artist Ben Ngobeni is redolent with depictions of “the cosmos” or outer-space. In this series, the bull is a prominent motif as it is represented literally and in some works, indirectly. The bull, as we may know, is central to many cultural rituals in different African societies. Ngobeni’s metaphorical use of this animal is resonant with Afrofuturist visual tropes that often employ space allegories. Yet it also invokes what jazz musician and Afrofuturist Sun Ra refers to as cosmo-drama. When coining this term, Sun Ra was alluding to the sense of otherworldliness he sought to achieve by staging cosmo-dramas, that is, spaces that were meant to “awaken their audiences to the greater potentials of another kind of life” (Youngquist, 2017:204). Cosmo-drama is here a fitting description of the type of themes engaged with in this body of work. This article is orientated around the notion of cosmo-drama to locate, on the one hand, the Afrofuturist proclivities in Ngobeni’s work, which are found visually. On the other hand, it seeks to understand how these supposed Afrofuturist proclivities are informed by aspects of ancestry.

Quare Times: An Introduction to a Queer Perspective on Afrofuturism and a Reading of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

The film Space Is the Place (1974), directed by John Coney, stars Sun Ra who was also co-author of the script. This chapter explores Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism as shown in the film, bringing it into relation with José Muñoz’s notion of a queer future. Rather than focusing on Sun Ra’s sexuality, this chapter argues that his quareness (E. Patrick Johnson’s useful term drawn from African American vernacular) emerges in the sonic and performative aspects of his work. Sun Ra’s spaceship offers a future-oriented response to the slave ship and Middle Passage (as described by Paul Gilroy) and to the limitations of the here and now. The notion of assemblage (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) articulates the quareness of Sun Ra’s collective improvisational practices.

Improvising on the Canon through Jazz Music and Biblical Interpretation in American Popular Culture

The chapter explores the resonances of jazz music, artistry and artists with biblical allusion and interpretation. It outlines the role that jazz played in American popular culture with reference to African American culture and the development of jazz from the American spirituals tradition. It examines representations of the Bible in jazz works by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Mahalia Jackson, and Ed Summerlin, including exploring the genre of “sacred jazz.” It moves from an exegetical analysis of jazz works in relation to the biblical text to a broader theological interpretation of biblical themes in improvisation. Drawing on Philip Bohlman’s analysis of music cultures, it articulates how improvisation shapes the cultural and religious identity of jazz music. Using the examples of John Coltrane and Sun Ra it argues that contemporary discussions of human freedom, liberation, and constraint are resourceful methodological tools for current biblical interpretations of jazz music.