Sun Ra, Metaphysical Religion, and the Making of a Black Radical Imagination

This dissertation centers the Chicago years (1946-1961) of the avant-garde jazz composer and poet Sun Ra to recover the intellectual and institutional history of an overlooked African American religious culture that emerged in the wake of the Great Migration (c.1915-1970). Through extensive archival research, I bring into view a religious subculture rooted in the circulation of esoteric and occult materials, which I collectively call “black metaphysical religion.” My dissertation documents the vibrant traffic in the occult within and between the centers of black migration and shows that black metaphysical religion provided the fundamental terms through which the demand for another world became imperative.Sun Ra is an icon of the black radical tradition. Known for his otherworldly idiom, Sun Ra’s “music of the space age” sounded a critique of American racial regimes and expressed alternative possibilities for black life, famously concluding that “space is the place” of black freedom. Yet, while scholars have designated Sun Ra’s outer space sound and style as paradigmatic of black radicalism, they produce a picture of the musician as a charismatic figure with a singular perspective. Instead, I excavate Sun Ra’s archive and distill the collective labor behind the making of his otherworldly program. In the context of Chicago’s reinvigorated efforts to segregate the city under the postwar pretense of urban renewal, black metaphysical religion became an essential means through which working-class residents organized and expressed their desire for a more just world. Sun Ra’s aesthetic vision emerged from the everyday culture of black metaphysical religion and I connect his well-known idiom to the lesser-known peoples, places, and intellectual traditions that together made “space the place.” Centering black metaphysical religion entails a re-evaluation of migration-era African American religion. The effects of the Great Migration on African American religious cultures are most often measured by looking to established Protestant institutions, the rise of storefront churches, and the birth of gospel music. Alternatively, attempts to de-center the equivalence of African American religion with black churches have focused attention on a fixed set of smaller “black sects and cults.” Departing from both models, I draw on Sun Ra’s personal library, business records, album artwork, newspaper clippings, recordings, and more to show how black metaphysical religion reshaped the city and its sounds in heretofore unexplored ways. I locate the force of this religious subculture outside of recognized religious geographies. Black metaphysical religion moved through kitchenette apartments, bookstores, basements, prisons, and queer clubs. Following Sun Ra across the city and taking seriously his popularity among working-class residents uncovers an alternative account of the relationship between African American religion and social struggle in the twentieth century