Knotting the Note to the Tone

Abstract

Afrofuturism is a movement that takes in the spiritual and the political. In this paper, I am interested in the way the political and the spiritual coexist in the works of Jean Toomer and Sun Ra. I argue—along with Paul Youngquist, whose book A Pure Solar World examines the spiritual philosophy of Sun Ra and argues that there is a definite political element to his spiritual philosophy— that the two cannot be separated from one another. Youngquist calls Ra’s spiritual philosophy “Political Theosophy.” I argue that this “Political Theosophy” has its origins in the concept of the cosmic consciousness; indeed, it is through a realization of this cosmic consciousness and through an awareness of the rich Black esoteric tradition that Black artists can engage in what Mark Foster Gage calls “aesthetic activism.” Furthermore, I will argue that a through-line can be traced from a racialized re-conceptualization of the concept of the cosmic consciousness in the poetry of Jean Toomer, through the poetry of Sun Ra, up until contemporary movements like Afrofuturism—a through-line that has its origins in the Black esoteric tradition and is made manifest in the spiritualized poetry of both these poets. As William Sites writes, Afrofuturism “draws on mythical African pasts in order to envision new black-centered worlds of the future.” In this paper, I will show how Toomer and Ra do this through their esoteric poetry.