Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future Underground, 1954-1968

[...]long after Sun Ra moved to New York in the early 1960s, Alton Abraham, Sun Ra's business manager and co-owner of the El Saturn record label-"one of the first musician-owned record companies"-manufactured the band's albums in Chicago by relying on the city's independent, black-owned businesses (Corbett, "Sun Ra" 7-8). Viewing this collection through the lens of sociotechnical and Afro-Futurist theory, Sun Ra "redeployed, reconceived, and re-created" (Fouché 642) the materials and metaphors of cold-war science in his artistic practice.\n At the same time, Sun Ra turned from the politics and tactics of the civil rights movement and social movement organizations, including the Black Panthers.