Chocolate Spectral Resonances: Calling Sun Ra, Calling Alton Sterling

• In Event: Educational Sound Studies and Sonic Pedagogies: Tales From the Field

Abstract

Father, son, partner, lover, comedian, and neighborhood CD salesman Alton Sterling was forced into premature ancestralhood on July 5, 2016. Sterling’s ascendance was due to the always endemically violent appendages of the police state, in this context, formulated as the Baton Rouge police department. However, I struggle with remembering him through the murder porn cesspools of social media and various other news veins (Author 3, 2017; Stoever, 2016; Author 1, 2021). I cannot unsee the image of Sterling being treated as target practice of the Baton Rouge police department. I want to and fight to re-orient myself to witnessing Sterling as the father, son, partner, lover, comedian, and neighborhood CD salesman. Additionally, these words ring true in non-linear desires when I reflect on the premature ancestralhoods of: Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Remie Falls, Daunté Wright and so many other beautiful chocolate souls. In my attempt to process the notion of Blackness as not equating to death, I have done things like the utilizing the phrase premature ancestralhood to remind myself that their souls live within and around me and us.

Yet, like any bad habit, it is hard to break. For me this habit is the over attentiveness to the drone of Blackness as being equated to death. However, I am always lodged in a peculiar space of simultaneity, when I am able to further dampen the Enlightenment project within myself, to feel and hear those and many other ancestral voices (Moten, 2003). I am reminded of this struggle amongst many folx especially those of the chocolate community when considering Katherine McKittrick’s 2014 article “Mathematics of Black Life” in which she identifies the myopic death lens applied to Black life through numbers. An overarching theme in McKittrick’s piece deals with the overrepresentation of Black life in numbers functioning as a deficit paradigm equating Black life to death. The continuation of my re-orienting from a lens of Black death to Black life will be engaged from a sonic consideration (Author 2, 2018). Therefore, I will turn to the sonic ethics of pianist, composer, and sound scientist, Sun Ra.

The two sonic elements expressing Sun Ra’s sonic ethics we be derived from from the cult movie classic Space is the Place (Coney, 1974) and the musical composition “Face the Music” (Hundal, 2013). In these two elements Ra’s philosophy of Blackness as life and living are witnessed. Afterwards I will come back to Alton Sterling to consider what might it mean “to face the music” regarding the sonic ethics of Sun Ra.

My panel contribution, in its full discursive spectrum, will utilize Sun Ra’s ethics, employed sonically, in two ways. First to re-examine the treatment of Alton Sterling, and secondly to consider broader possibilities of how afro-surrealist ethic, situated as sonic pedagogies, provide additional ways of re-memory work as acknowledging Blackness as living in simultaneously formal and informal educational spaces/places (Dillard, 2012; Kelley, 2002; Miller, 2012).

Author

• Reagan P. Mitchell, University of North Carolina School of the Arts
  Presenting Author