Saturn’s Ark: The Improvised Archives, Politics, and Performances of Sun Ra by Brian J. Lefresne A Thesis presented to The University of Guelph In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Literary/Theatre Studies in English Guelph, Ontario, Canada © Brian J. Lefresne, January, 2018 ABSTRACT SATURN’S ARK: THE IMPROVISED ARCHIVES, POLITICS, AND PERFORMANCES OF SUN RA Brian J. Lefresne Advisor: University of Guelph, 2018 Professor Ajay Heble This dissertation examines the relationship between Black experimental performer Sun Ra (and his ensemble known as the Arkestra) and the archives of Black expressive culture. The archive, both conceptually and physically, provides a theoretical approach to understanding the cultural and social influences present in the musical performances, social practices, and politics of Ra and the Arkestra. In Chapter One, I detail how Ra’s elaborate concert spectacles known as “myth-rituals” should be understood as an act of archival preservation and intervention. Within these concerts Ra was able to maintain traditions of Black sacred and secular performance cultures that provided a performative grammar to ward off the commodification of jazz and other improvised musics within formal settings. In the second chapter, I shift my attention towards Ra and the Arkestra’s clothing and fashion. I argue that these sartorial choices may be seen as an “alternative archive.” The materiality and style of Ra and the Arkestra’s clothing function as an archival repository that captures the heterogeneity of, and often competing, discourses around Black visual and embodied identity politics of early 1970s America. Moreover, I suggest that Ra and the Arkestra’s dress is in dialogue with Black diasporic traditions of dandyism and tricksterism. The final chapter shifts towards the historical moment of the Space Race. In this chapter I suggest that Ra’s sounds, words, and visual identity from the years 1969-1972 must be seen as part of a wider movement of Black diasporic cultural actors whose works form what I call the Black counter-archive of the Space Race. I contend that Ra and his contemporaries produced cultural artefacts that can be positioned as part of an archival repository that critiques the mainly American and wholly white archive of human- powered space travel and exploration. In my conclusion, I examine how Ra’s persona and his performance practices (in tandem with the Arkestra) confound conventional approaches to archives and archiving. This discussion is followed by a brief coda where I explore the ways in which the practice of engaging in archival research might itself be seen as an improvisatory act. iv Dedication To Kim v Acknowledgments This project would have never seen the light of day without the guidance of my sagacious advisory committee: Drs. Ajay Heble, Daniel Fischlin, and Christine Bold. Thank you for reading every word of this document and providing an untold amount of advice and guidance relating to this project and my studies. To Jade Ferguson, it seems like only yesterday I was asking you to sign the waiver me in to your seminar. Thank you for the numerous conversations, professional guidance, and fellowship over the years. To Brent Hayes Edwards, thank you for reading this document in its entirety and your generous feedback and suggestions for future directions to take this project. This dissertation could not have been completed without the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice Research Project, the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, the University of Guelph. I must single out the Robert L. Platzman Fellowship from the University of Chicago. Without this award, many, if not all, of the previously mentioned sources of funding could not have materialized. An enormous amount of gratitude is extended to Christine Colburn and Barbara Gilbert of the Special Collections and Research Center of the University of Chicago and Sally Conkright and Adam Vida of the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Illinois. Without fail all of you rose to the occasion and assisted with matters pertaining to your collections. This project is stronger because of your contributions and insights. It would be irresponsible of me to not mention Marshall Allen, Danny Thompson, and Knoel Scott. The three of you were more than generous with your time and your knowledge over the course of two days in 2013 and planted the seeds for what this dissertation ultimately became. More importantly, you are keeping alive Sun Ra’s unique manifestation of a joyful noise. Like my atypical journey through graduate school, the people that I need to thank is wide-ranging, diverse, and representative of various phases of my life and academic journey. First and foremost I have to thank Tamara Levitz. Your generosity and support during a time when the mere thought of talking about the possibility of writing a dissertation seemed like a far-fetched idea made this moment possible. Your act was my first exposure to radical pedagogy and what mentorship inside and outside of the academy should look like. To Elaine Chang, Julie Cairnie, Michelle Elleray, Jennifer Schacker, Mark Lipton, Paul Salmon, Steven Powell, Danny O’Quinn, and Ann Wilson, much gratitude for the various professional tips and personal advice throughout the years. To Justine Richardson, Liz Jackson, Rachel Collins, and Kim Thorne of the ICASP/IICSI office, most importantly thank you for your friendship, but also thanks for your assistance and support with this project and various offshoots over the past six years. To my esteemed colleagues, peers, and friends Alec Follet, Kimber Sider, Mark Kaethler, Greg Fenton, David Lee, Mirali Almaula, Paul Watkins, Cynthia Ing, Margot Beckmann, Leslie Allen, Hannah MacGregor, Nick Loess, Alessia Ursella, Mark Laver, Erin Bustin, Mark V. Campbell, Rebecca Caines, Harald Kisiedu, Meagan Troop, Tom Zlabinger, Vilde Aaslid, Chris Wells, Alicia Levin, and Allison Portnow Lathrop, thanks for accompanying me on this journey and listening to my bevy of hot takes. I must also thank the staff of SETS: Olga Petrik, Yvonne Yates, and Phyllis Reynen. All three of you rose to the occasion when need be. Along these same lines, I must thank various faculty and staff members of SOFAM, SOLAL, and History at the University of Guelph who have offered support from the sidelines over the years. I also must acknowledge Eric Porter, Imani Owens, Sherrie Tucker, Monica O’Connell, Paul Steinbeck, Aria Halliday, Lauren Jackson, Brandy Monk-Payton, Keith Cartwright, Kristin Moriah, Martyn vi Bone, Jim Watkins, Zachary Vernon, Michael Bibler, Alex Corey, Daphne Carr, Claudia Carrera, Ali Neff, Josslyn Luckett, Marcel Swiboda, and Lauren Mueller. All of you offered insightful feedback and commentary about this project alongside camaraderie at meetings of the American Studies Association, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium and I thank you for that. Shoutout to the SnapSquad! The non-ephemeral nature of this document prevents me from truly expressing my gratitude and a host of other superlatives to the two of you, but here is a feeble attempt: 🐐🔥💎. To my parents Wilf and Kay Lefresne, and my brother Pete Lefresne, thank you for everything over the years. To Emily, Ellison, and Quinton, you have provided an untold amount of joy in my life and have kept me grounded throughout this entire process. I was able to complete this project because of the energy the three of you emanate. And finally, to Kim. There are no words. You have believed in me through thick and thin and have been a greater champion of me than myself. The completion of this degree is a testament to that. The sacrifices that you have had to make over the past six years are innumerable and can never be properly repaid. Thank you for everything, I love you, and this work is dedicated to you. vi i Table of Contents Preface .............................................................................................................................................1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................8 The Dead Past ................................................................................................................................10 Sun Ra and the Jazz Archive .........................................................................................................16 Black Studies, Black Archives, and Archiving Blackness ............................................................22 Methodology: Why the Archive? ...................................................................................................29 The Long Civil Rights Era: New Temporal, Social, and Historical Frameworks .........................39 Chapter Breakdown .......................................................................................................................50 Chapter One: A Spectacle of Resistance: Sun Ra’s Sacred-Secular Stagecraft, Abstract Noise, and the Archive ................................................................................................................54 Myth-Rituals .................................................................................................................................57 The Jazz Concert: A New Tradition .............................................................................................65 Abstract, Joyful Noise: Ra’s Keyboards and Sonic Subjectivity ...................................................83 Noise ..............................................................................................................................................91 Abstract planes of sound and sight ................................................................................................96 Conclusion—An Archive of Destabilizing Excess: The Limits of Archiving Blackness ............101 Chapter Two: Sonic and Material Weaves: Sun Ra’s Alternative Archive of Dress .........108 Clothing, Costume, Dress, Fashion: The Politics of Terms .........................................................111 Fashion Studies: The Politics of Studying What We Wear .........................................................113 The Fanonian Moment: Dress Covering Race .............................................................................117 Sun Ra and Black Diasporic Dress: Cultural, Historical, and Social Contexts ...........................120 Are Those Moonshoes?: Sun Ra’s Dress Addressing Black Power ............................................130 Dandy Tricksters, Tricked Out Dandies: Sun Ra and the Play of the Cloth ................................144 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................154 Chapter Three: Sun Ra and the Black Counter-archive of the Space Race, 1969-1972 .....156 Outer and Black Geographic Spaces ............................................................................................161 From Flying Africans to Afronauts ..............................................................................................167 “The Eagle Has Landed . . .”: Apollo 11 and the Black counter-archive .....................................179 “…that space station they got out there”: Sun Ra and Salyut I ..................................................192 After Apollo?: Space is the Place and the Decline of NASA ......................................................196 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................198 Conclusion: Saturn’s Ark—A New Type of Archive..............................................................202 Coda: “Excuse me while I improvise”: Archival Research as Improvisatory Act ..............212 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................219 vii i List of Figures Fig. 0.1 Album cover of 1973 version of Atlantis .........................................................................49 Fig. 1.1 Ra Standing at the keyboards at the beginning of performance .......................................83 Fig. 1.2 Closeup of Ra manipulating the Moog synthesizer ..........................................................84 Fig. 1.3 Album cover of 1966 version of Magic City ....................................................................97 Fig. 2.1 Sun Ra, John Gilmore, Kwame Hadi, and unidentified member, c. 1972 .....................108 Fig. 2.2 Sun Ra in the youth centre .............................................................................................131 Fig. 2.3 Sun Ra’s sartorial look ...................................................................................................134 Fig. 2.4 Angela Davis and her afro hairstyle. .............................................................................140 Fig. 2.5 Closeup of Sun Ra’s metallic hair. .................................................................................141 Fig 5.1 Cover of 16mm film canister, “Les Halles” ....................................................................212 Preface Influential jazz musician, poet, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra continues to maintain his status as the ultimate outsider within jazz performance. Embracing a cosmic persona, mixing composed music with free-improvisation, and integrating theatrical elements into his performances, Ra’s life and music straddle geographic borders, stylistic categories, generic conventions, and conceptions of humanity––especially with regard to racial politics. In Saturn’s Ark, I build on recent work from the fields of improvisation, race, gender, archival, and performance studies to critically assess our understanding of Ra within musical, theatrical, political, and intellectual performance traditions of the Black diaspora and the American nation- state.1 Starting from Black working-class performance culture of the late nineteenth-century to mass entertainment of the twenty-first, Saturn’s Ark explores how we can garner a better understanding and appreciation of Sun Ra’s life and works through the prism of the archive. Placing the relationship between Ra and the archive at the fore allows for a greater discussion of how Ra engaged with and manipulated the archives and traditions of Black expressive culture. My work generates space for a larger discussion about the nature of and the relationship between Black diasporic peoples and their cultures and the knowledge warehouse that is the archive. What this study will show is that Ra’s concert spectacles, his clothing and fashion, and his engagement with key events of the Space Race suggest the need for new conceptions and configurations of what constitutes, what is contained in, and what is considered an archive. 1 Throughout this dissertation I have chosen to capitalize Black when I refer to peoples and cultures of African descent and to follow recent trends by Black scholars and scholars active in the wider field of Black Studies. For more on this topic see Tharps. 1 Indeed, approaching Ra’s life, music, words, and visual appearance in relation to the archive unveils that he was more engaged with earth-based racial and social politics than he is given credit for, and that he was more concerned with ideas of cultural memory and the historical record than has been previously considered. In turn, Ra’s probing and remixing of various archives of Black expressive culture forces us to ponder new considerations and approaches to conducting archival research and the archiving practices of Black expressive culture. But before any discussion of Ra’s musical practices and the notion of archives can commence, one must have a clearer understanding of who Sun Ra was and what his musical practices and philosophical aesthetics represent. As John Szwed writes in his biography of Sun Ra, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, “at the heart of everything that Sun Ra did or said was the claim that he was not born, that he was not from earth, that he was not a man, that he had no family, that his name was not what others said it was” (5).2 This claim of non- human existence was a recurrent topic in numerous articles about and interviews with Ra. In a short article with Harriet Choice that appeared in a 1972 edition of the Chicago Tribune, Ra refers to his earth name as “just a name to gig around with” as if to imply that his earth name was just a label to wear so he could blend in on this planet (Choice). In other instances, Ra would assert that he was a “being from another dimension” (Farris). What becomes clear throughout interviews, articles, and essays is that Szwed’s description of Ra as an extreterrestrial life form was not an exaggeration. Ra really did believe that he was not of this world and he would take any and every opportunity to remind audiences and critics alike of this point. 2 For a more thorough and complete account of Ra’s biography and especially his early years see Szwed, Space 1-50. 2