Space Is the Place
Without Space Is the Place no Black Panther? Afrofuturism on screen pretty much starts with this cosmic freak-out from Sun Ra. Made in 1972, released in 1974, Space Is the Place sets out an alternative agenda for black Americans, suggesting an imaginative future of sci-fi possibility unconstrained by the daily grind of the street hustle. The film builds theoretically out from Ra’s series of Berkeley lectures titled The Black Man in the Cosmos. With sci-fi and white guys inevitable bedfellows at the time, Ra’s lectures about the place of black people in modernity had seemed like missives from an alternate reality (actually, the future, it turned out). His film sets out with the … Read more