Chocolate Spectral Resonances: Calling Sun Ra, Calling Alton Sterling

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Sound Studies for Remedy and Repair in Education and Education Research (Table 7)

Abstract

Afro-surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killah. We look to Kehinde Wiley, whose observation about the black male body applies to all art and culture: “There is no way to objectively view the image itself.” (Miller, 2012, p. 12)

Of the artists mentioned in the 5th tenant of D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black is the New Black (2012) Sun Ra will be the focus of this paper. While viewed in the dichotomy of eccentric and genius, the central point that will be focused upon in this paper is Sun Ra’s ethics presented through his music. In his composition “Face the Music” (1994), Sun Ra, along the with his ensemble, the Arkestra, inquire/proclaim/imperatively assert, “What do you do when you know, that you know... that you know that you wrong? You got to face the music. You got to listen to the cosmos song.” The collective inquiry/statement is an ethical identification. One, whereby, Ra and Arkestra inquire about how responsibility will (and must) be engaged, in light of atrocities committed and observed by the public sphere. Sun Ra saw himself as sound scientist in search of the combination of tonalities which would heal the world (Szwed, 1997). It is with these ethical considerations by which I reexamine the lynching of Alton Sterling.

Father, son, partner, lover, comedian, and neighborhood CD salesman Alton Sterling was violently lynched at the hands of the Baton Rouge police department on July 5, 2016. Sterling’s case is extremely unfortunate, however not uncommon. Specifically, the lynching of a Black/P.O.C./Poor/People with Disabilities/Queer Folks along with state sanctioned (supported) invisibility of their lives and character decimation. Additionally, as Miller asserts about the objective impossibility in viewing “black male body” (p. 12), afro-surrealistically considered, Sterling suffered from objectivism of the state. Again, what does it mean “to face the music” in regard to Sterling and the ethics of to Sun Ra?

Altogether, this paper utilizes Sun Ra’s ethics, employed sonically, in two ways. First to re-examine the treatment of Alton Sterling and family, and secondly to consider broader possibilities of how afro-surrealist ethic, situated as sonic pedagogies, provides additional ways of actively doing in simultaneously formal and informal educational spaces/places.

Author

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