Episode 17: William Sites on Sun Ra

The Interview: In Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (The University of Chicago Press), William Sites brings the cosmic musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961, he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: 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 the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. On this episode, William Sites, the Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, talks with J.C. Gabel about the mid-century history of Chicago’s South Side via the visionary Sun Ra. The Reading:Musician, artist and poet Damon Locks reads from Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City.Music by Sun Ra and His Arkestra