‘The other side of time’: spatial thinking,race,and technology in the musical technique of Sun Ra

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between race, technology, music, and geographical thought through the vehicle of jazz musician Sun Ra’s piece ‘Space Is the Place’ considered in formal, historical, and critical context. Specifically, the author engages with Katherine McKittrick’s concept of transparent space to argue that ‘Space Is the Place’, in a tradition reaching from Ra’s avant-garde popular music back through a rich tradition of Black American musical practice, deploys time signature in a way that upsets traditional concepts of grounds or grounding embedded at the foundation of Western thought. Taking seriously Ra’s conviction that his music literally, and not merely figuratively, transports listeners to a new planet, this article speculatively suggests that the form of thought generated by the music’s disruption of grounds/grounding is uniquely suitable for addressing the radical social, economic, and political shifts currently occurring in humanity’s rapidly intensifying flight from the grounds of the Earth. The compression of these vast social forces into the sensuous experience of ‘Space Is the Place’ thus transports the listener by altering fundamental processes of spatiotemporal relationality that echo into conscious thought. This article demonstrates the interconnectedness of musical expression with geographical imaginaries and suggests a new kind of thinking with which to approach geographical analyses beyond the geocentric, capable of answering the demands of the cosmos.