ABSTRACT
In 1971 avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra was expelled from a house in Oakland, California, owned by the Black Panther Party. On the surface, the pairing of Sun Ra and the Black Panthers is a striking study in contrasts. While Sun Ra's conception of mythic consciousness was articulated in terms of a group technological agency for black people, the use of "plastic dialogue" in his music was directed at fostering individual psychological change to enable intersubjective understanding and coordination. The chapter demonstrates how technological artifacts and metaphors were used as agents of psychological change during the 1950s and 1960s. Sun Ra's engagement with artifacts and metaphors of energy and advanced technologies represents a black cultural uptake and reconception of cold war science in terms of long-established African-American social narratives of liberation and empowerment. Party member Connie Matthews delivered a speech in 1969 that cast the American space program as an extension of a global Euro-American capitalist project of colonization.
