by Emma Dabiri

I put all things about Ancient Egypt out of my head since they failed. I’m thinking about the future of Black Egypt, which is outside the realm of history. So what I’m talking about is the myth, and nothing that has ever been, is part of what I’m talking about. Black folks need a mythocracy not a democracy. History has been very unkind to black people. They not gonna make it in history. His Story is not gonna help black folks at all….

Thus spoke Professor Sun-Ra, in his 1971 Berkley lecture The Black Man in the Cosmos, segments of which narrate the following mixtape.

Join me in an exploration of Afrofuturism, and as we examine the ideas of the aesthetic – as set out by Sun Ra – a startling irony emerges.

One can draw parallels between the Afrofuturistic orientation articulated by Ra, and attempts…