Paul Youngquist is professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder. He writes on music, popular literature, and Caribbean history. He is the author of Cyberfiction: After the Future, among other titles.
Janelle Monáe helped redirect 21st-century attention to
Afrofuturism with her 2018 LP Dirty Computer, but Paul Youngquist's
recent release explores Sun Ra's pioneering experimentations with
the aesthetic, which probes the African diaspora through a
scientific lens.-- "The Austin Chronicle" (12/8/2023 12:00:00
AM)
"Sun Ra left Earth a better place than he found it. Youngquist's
deep dive into this art is creative, discursive, and probing. . . .
A strictly formal critique of the musician would have generated its
own insights, but by pulling the music of Sun Ra into its broader
context, Youngquist engages readers in something grander.
They--both Sun Ra and Youngquist--give the contentious politics of
resistance, the starlit frontiers of imagination, and the contours
of hope a fresh look. As Sun Ra would agree, it is only a fresh
look at our world that will rocket people to a new and more
splendid universe."-- "Rain Taxi" (5/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)
"The title is well chosen. Sun Ra's legacy is as much the vision of
another world, and another way of being, as it is a unique approach
to music. . . . [His] relationship with pop culture is equally
fascinating and the impact he made on a wide range of artists who
achieved far greater mainstream commercial success . . . is
significant to say the least. Youngquist's prose is vivid and
concise, making a subject some might still find forbidding anything
but. A welcome invitation to the spaceways."-- "Jazzwise" (2/1/2017
12:00:00 AM)
"Youngquist has published an excellent critical take on Sun Ra's
creation myth and its relation to broader currents of America's
postwar social imaginary."-- "PopMatters" (12/8/2016 12:00:00 AM)
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