From Arkestra to Ashram: Afro‑Futurist Womanist Theologies of Black Sound

This paper argues that Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane trouble dominant narratives of Black religion, music, sexuality, and Afro‑futurism by centering a Black, womanist‑inflected spiritual imagination that exceeds church and nation. Positioned at the intersection of Afro‑futurism and spiritual jazz, it shows how their sonic and "fashion‑forward" experiments recast Black sacred sound as a laboratory for Black futures in the mid‑ to late‑twentieth century. Drawing on historical and interdisciplinary archival methods—including recordings, liner notes, film, interviews, Arkestra ephemera, and materials from Coltrane’s ashram—alongside Black religious thought, womanist theology, and Afrofuturism studies, the paper traces how experimental music, Black religious curiosity, and transnational spiritual currents reshape U.S. Black religious formations from the 1950s to the 1980s. Interpreting Sun Ra’s cosmology and Alice Coltrane’s devotional jazz and sanctified harmonies, it proposes a multimedia presentation that demonstrates sound, image, and performance as a theological method and highlights Black women’s spiritual labor and queer‑adjacent aesthetics.