Saturday, January 30, 2010

Sun Ra's Reading List for African-American Studies 198: The Black Man in the Universe



Listed below are the books assigned by Sun Ra for his lecture course, African-American Studies 198: The Black Man in the Universe. The classes were offered as part of the regular Spring semester at the University of California, Berkeley, 1971.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Radix
Alexander Hislop: Two Babylons
The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky
The Book of Oahspe
Henry Dumas: Ark of Bones
Henry Dumas: Poetry for My People eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Redmond, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Leroi Jones & Larry Neal, New York: William Morrow 1968
David Livingston: Missionary Travels
Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro
Rutledge: God's Children
Stylus,
vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Temple University
John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It's At, United States Information Agency
Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books 1972
Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney: The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, London: Pioneer Press 1921
The Source Book of Man's Life and Death (Ra's description; = The King James Bible)
Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky: A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956
Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben, New York: Norton & Co. 1944
Blackie's Etymology

8 comments:

yesIah garvey said...

do you know of any recordings of class lectures available on the internet ? my wife said she heard some tapes from SR's class lectures on KDVS - Davis (CA) just yesterday ...
thanks for your posts !

Justin Desmangles said...

The only recording that I am aware of is that of the third lecture. This was recently made available through a "bootleg" by Transparency. I broadcast this, in it's entirety, yesterday on New Day Jazz, at KDVS, as part of a larger celebration of his works with the Arkestra. The post following this one has both the playlist and the link to the mp3 file to that show. I am sure that other recordings must exist of the lecture course Sun Ra was teaching and will surface some day soon. Quite a bit of his poetry and philosophical writings are back in print, as well.

yesIah garvey said...

justin thank you
DVS has been excellent for jazz for many years; unfortunately we're just on the edge of the listening area in the grass valley area
appreciate your answer :)

Anonymous said...

Hi! The Transparency releases are not bootlegs, for the record. They are done with the permission of the Arkestra members and payment is made for them. But thanks for playing them, and I do love that Berkeley lecture.

Justin Desmangles said...

Thank you for the clarification on the "bootleg" question. It is much appreciated.

Expligatory said...

I'm not sure if this is the same lecture Justin was talking about in his post, but here is a lecture I just found out about from his UC Berkeley class in 1971:

http://blog.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/wp-content/audio/Ra-Sun_Berkeley-Lecture_1971.mp3

Unknown said...

This may be wildly redundant but the link below has audio from one of the lectures. That post links back to this blog as the refrernce material for thier article so maybe you all already have this. But just in case. http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/full-lecture-and-reading-list-from-sun-ras-1971-uc-berkeley-course.html

It's not for the profane to know but it's pretty obvious, read Michael Aquino's 50th anniversary commentary on the Satanic Bible. He says a cryptic phrase that some would get some wouldn't to exp said...

This isn't the whole list. There was a whole page of the original arkestra class reading list, it had the vedanta book in it - and sunny wasn't an afro futurist,he was from now. You needto watch the movie space is the place - where he plays a game with the devil, and of course wins, taking the kids with him out of the ghetto on his space ship to another planet, a musical planet.