Announcing a New Series—MF! Momentary Futures in Black Studies

Edited by L.H. Stallings

Acquiring Editor Dawn Durante

Committed to the enjoyment of disjointedness and the asynchrony of Black thought experiences, MF! is a series about funky temporalities, adaptation, and mobility. The series encourages the submission of manuscripts whose methods and aesthetics allow us to experience Black pleasure, joy, and futurity. Books in the series are transgressive and experimental while also dealing with the conflicts that arise from the intellectual and artistic boundaries of knowledge production; the defense, surveillance, and policing of Black knowledge; and the political and social constraints of normative and respectable existence as well as aspirational citizenship and humanity. The series fosters projects that center decolonization, Black lives and culture, Black solidarities and relationalities with other communities of color, and other topics within and beyond Black studies to challenge the parameters of current theories, advance new ideas about knowledge production, and speculate about a world without fear of sexual intimacy, without racial capitalism, and without finite approaches to the field of Black studies.

The series is inspired by the irreverent voices of Moms Mabley, Gayl Jones, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Beatty, Cheryl Clarke, and Toni Cade Bambara. Its intellectual production is informed by trickster tales, neo-slave narratives, experimental art and theater, Afrofuturism, Afro surrealism, satire, and parody. The series understands irreverence and adaptation as methodology. It facilitates creative collaborations and encourages interactive engagement across fields that intersect with Black studies, including sexuality studies, trans studies, performance studies, film studies, disability studies, environmental studies, critical translation studies, sound studies, and cultural studies, as well as medical and digital humanities. With a particular interest in manuscripts clearly conceived, written in accessible language, and of a reasonable length, the series seeks scholarly nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and co-authored projects as well as works representing genre-blending innovations that disrupt and defy disciplinarity and temporality.

Please contact Dr. Stallings (lh855@georgetown.edu) and Dawn Durante (ddurante@utpress.utexas.edu) for more details about submitting a project for the series.

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Marquis Bey, Northwestern University

Darius Bost, University of Utah

Lyndon K. Gill, University of Texas at Austin

Tiffany Lethabo King, University of Virginia

Xavier Livermon, University of California Santa Cruz

Mireille Miller-Young, University of California Santa Barbara

Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison

SA Smythe, University of Toronto

Deborah R. Vargas, Rutgers University

www.utexaspress.com

An Afrofuturist Guide to the Cosmos

By Paul Youngquist

He came from Saturn. He traveled the space ways. He created better music for a better world. Sun Ra’s reputation as an inspired musician is finally on the rise. But Sun Ra was much more than that: a poet, a prophet, and an activist whose medium was sound. “I

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would hate to pass through a planet,” he once said, “and not leave it a better place.” He did just that, if the stunning body of recording he left behind is any measure: hundreds of LPs, miles of tape, and countless fan recordings of concerts, radio broadcasts, and interviews.

He created a cosmos of sound. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism explores its origins and aims: the places that inspire Sun Ra’s music and the spaces it opens for new ways of living, especially for African Americans. As a black man from Birmingham, Alabama, who moved to mid-century Chicago (to speak in earthly terms), Sun Ra experienced first-hand the indignities of racism and segregation. He created a better future by composing music and writing poetry. His glorious achievement makes him the granddaddy of Afrofuturism, the contemporary cultural movement dedicated to imagining new black worlds.

The only way into the future for Sun Ra is through space age sound. This playlist follows the long arc of his career with the “Arkestra,” the name he gave his shape-shifting band. From inner city to outer space: Sun Ra’s exploratory music moves from the familiar to the otherworldly and back again. It was always a collaborative voyage involving diverse musicians, audiences, and supporters, financial and spiritual. You’re part of it now. Listen with an open heart. Imagine a better tomorrow.

“Super Blonde”: The Sun Ra Arkestra’s very first release, a 45 rpm single appearing in 1956. “Super Blonde” reappears a year later on El Saturn’s first LP, Super-Sonic Jazz. The tune announces the arrival on planet Earth of a formidable ensemble, skilled in the herky-jerky rhythms of bebop. The harmonized head, coming after Sun Ra’s mid-tempo piano intro, is pure Charlie Parker. Boppers beware!

“Spaceship Lullaby”: Rehearsal tapes contain wonders, and Sun Ra always had tapes running. In the mid-fifties he coached several doo-wop ensembles. The singers here called their group The Nu Sounds, and Sun Ra arranged their harmonies. In this case he wrote their lyrics too, including phrases appearing again in later Arkestra recordings: “zoom, zoom, up in the air,” and “interplanetary melodies.” The Nu Sounds’s space trip takes a dangerous turn when the singers must fly through the sun to arrive at Saturn.