This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Afro-Surrealism (also Afro-surrealism, AfroSurrealism) is a genre or school of art and literature. [1] In 1974, Amiri Baraka used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. [2] D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote "The Afro-surreal Manifesto" [3] in which he says: "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist ...." The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto lists ten tenets that Afro-Surrealism follows including how "Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past", and how "Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it".
Afro-Surrealism, is practiced and embodied in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners and inspirations of Afro-Surrealism include Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, René Ménil, Kool Keith, Terence Nance, Will Alexander, Kara Walker, Samuel R. Delany, and Romare Bearden.
D. Scot Miller penned "The Afro-surreal Manifesto" for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in May, 2009. [3] Until that time, the term "Afro-surreal Expressionism" was used solely by Amiri Baraka to describe the writings of Henry Dumas. Later that year, Miller spoke with Baraka about extending the term by shortening the description. It was agreed by the two of them that "Afro-surreal" without the "expressionism" would allow further exploration of the term. Afro-surrealism may have some similar origins to surrealism in the mid-1920s, in that an aspect of it Négritude came after André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, but as Leopold Senghor points out in Miller's manifesto, "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical." [3]
Afro-Surrealism is directly connected to black history, experience, and aesthetics, particularly as affected by Western culture. British-Nigerian short story writer Irenosen Okojie describes the genre: [4]
Afro-surrealism, which couples the bizarre with ideas of black identity and power, allows for more expansive explorations of blackness. If blackness shrinks or feels limited under the crushing, often insidiously damaging weight of western systems of oppression, specifically the endemic tolls of structural racism, then the extraordinary provides space to construct new realities and absurdist visions that reconfigure what blackness as an aesthetic can be.
Afro-Surrealism more specifically incorporates aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and Black Radical Imagination as described by Robin D. G. Kelley in his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, [5] and further with his Afro-surreal historical anthology, Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009). [6] Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire's discussion of the "revolutionary impetus of surrealism" in the 1940s. [7]
Suzanne Césaire, a surrealist thinker and partner of Aimé Césaire, was an important figure in the history of the Afro-surreal aesthetic. [8] Her quest for "The Marvelous" over the "miserablism" [8] expressed in the usual arts of protest inspired the Tropiques surrealist group, and especially René Ménil. Ménil says in "Introduction to the Marvelous" (1930s):[ This quote needs a citation ]
The true task of mankind consists solely in the attempt to bring the marvelous into real life, so that life can become more encompassing. So long as the mythic imagination is not able to overcome each and every boring mediocrity, human life will amount to nothing but useless, dull experiences, just killing time, as they say. [9]
Suzanne Césaire's proclamation, "Be in permanent readiness for The Marvelous", quickly became a credo of the movement; the word "marvelous" has since become recontextualized with regard to contemporary black arts and interventions. [8]
In his 1956 essay for Présence Africaine, Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis wrote: "What, then, is the Marvellous, except the imagery in which a people wraps its experience, reflects its conception of the world and of life, its faith, its hope, its confidence in man, in a great justice, and the explanation which it finds for the forces antagonistic to progress?" [10] In his work, Alexis is seen to have an acute sense of reality that is not unlike that of traditional surrealism, and his coining of the term "Marvelous Realism" reflects his influence by the earlier works of the Négritude/Black Surrealist Movement.
The term "Afro-surreal Expressionism" was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1974 essay on Black Arts Movement avant-garde writer Henry Dumas. [11] Baraka notes that Dumas is able to write about ancient mysteries that were simultaneously relevant to the present day. Comparing Dumas' writing to "Toni Morrison's wild, emotional 'places'," Baraka writes that "[b]oth utilize high poetic description—language of exquisite metaphorical elegance, even as narrative precision". But, for Baraka, this "language tells as well as decorates":
The world of Ark of Bones, for instance, shares a black mythological lyricism, strange yet ethnically familiar! Africa, the southern U.S., black life and custom are motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history. [12]
Dumas, therefore, was—"despite his mythological elegance and deep signification"—still "part of the wave of African American writers at the forefront of the '60s Black Arts Movement". [13] Precisely because of its strangeness and its deformation of reality, Dumas work bears a deep political truth: "The very broken quality, almost to abstraction, is a function of change and transition." [14]
Unlike Afro-Futurism which speculates on possibilities in the future, Afro-surrealism, as Miller describes, is about the present. "Rather than speculate on the coming of the four horseman, Afrosurrealists understand that they rode through too long ago. Through Afro-surrealism, artists expose this form of the future past that is right now." [15]
According to Terri Francis: "Afro-surrealism is art with skin on it where the texture of the object tells its story, how it weathered burial below consciousness, and how it emerged somewhat mysteriously from oceans of forgotten memories and discarded keepsakes. This photograph figures Afro-surrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky." [16]
Irensonen Okojie wrote of the genre's flexibility have a relationship to life's breadth: [4]
If we are to embrace all the dimensions of the movement, its symbiotic potential through an Afro-surrealist lens, then there must be room for black joy, black virtuosity, black mediocrity, space to fail upwards. The autonomy to define our stories, to operate within and beyond frameworks that already exist should lie in our hands. Storytelling is power. It is cultural currency. The elasticity of Afro-surrealism gives room for every facet of blackness to be explored.
In the manifesto from which present day Afro-surrealism is based, writer D. Scot Miller states in a response to Afrofuturism:
"Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow's-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past."
As "The Afro-Surreal Manifesto" and Afrofuturism come to the fore in artistic, commercial and academic circles, the struggle between the specific and "the scent" of present-day manifestations of black absurdity has come with it, posing interesting challenges to both movements. For Afrofuturists, this challenge has been met by inserting Afrocentric elements into its growing pantheon, the intention being to centralize Afrofuturist focus back on the continent of Africa to enhance its specificity. For the Afro-surrealists, the focus has been set at the "here and now" of contemporary Black arts and situations in the Americas, Antilles, and beyond, searching for the nuanced "scent" of those current manifestations. [17]
Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Novel [18] remains an important milestone for Afro-surrealists. Here, Morrison imagines a narrative of a formerly enslaved woman grieving the death of her baby daughter, Beloved. With no trace of a past, Beloved reappears on the steps of her mother's home, confused and looking for her mother. Following this moment, the novel crafts a haunting tale of a woman seeking to understand the sudden reappearance of her daughter and the scars left behind from slavery. In Beloved, Morrison attempts to come to grip with the legacies left by slavery, challenging the notion that these exist only in the past. From the epigraph, "Sixty Million and more", Morrison presupposes there is no way to count those affected from slavery and additionally, that the number is ever-growing into the present. In her award-winning novel, Morrison expands on the idea of the past, attempting to demonstrate the past is ever present. [19]
In Zong!, M. Nourbese Philip crafts a counter-narrative surrounding the events of the Zong massacre. [20] Utilizing the words from the legal decision to build her poetry, Philip rejects the idea of an archival past. Instead, Philip looks to the present moment to understand how to read this legal decision and understand the case. Following the footsteps of Morrison's Beloved, Philip presupposes the notion of a past that is not past allowing these past artifacts to haunt the present moment. Rather than organize the fragments, Philip allows the fragments to tell themselves. This is not to say that Philip gives the fragments voices, but instead gives them space. The space in the poem allows Philip's audience to hear the silence of these voices, to truly understand the missing narratives form the past and the role that has on the present.
Atlanta is an American comedy-drama television series created by Donald Glover that premiered on September 6, 2016, on FX. The series centers on college dropout and music manager Earnest "Earn" Marks (played by Glover) and rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) as they navigate a strange, seemingly otherworldly version of the Atlanta rap scene, examining racism, whiteness, existentialism and modern African-American culture through Afro-Surrealism. [21] It also stars LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz.
Sorry to Bother You is a 2018 American surrealist, urban fantasy, science fiction, black-comedy film written and directed by Boots Riley, in his directorial debut. It stars LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Omari Hardwick, Terry Crews, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Danny Glover, Steven Yeun, and Armie Hammer. The film follows a young black telemarketer who adopts a "white accent" to succeed at his job. Swept into a corporate conspiracy, he must choose between profit and joining his activist friends to organize labor. [22]
Random Acts of Flyness (2018–present) is a late night sketch comedy series created by American artist Terence Nance for HBO. [1]
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Theodore Joans was an American jazz poet, surrealist, trumpeter, and painter, who from the 1960s spent periods of time travelling in Europe and Africa. His work stands at the intersection of several avant-garde streams and some have seen in it a precursor to the orality of the spoken-word movement. However, he criticized the competitive aspect of "slam" poetry. Joans is known for his motto: "Jazz is my religion, and Surrealism is my point of view". He was the author of more than 30 books of poetry, prose, and collage, among them Black Pow-Wow, Beat Funky Jazz Poems, Afrodisia, Jazz is Our Religion, Double Trouble, WOW and Teducation.
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word négritude in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.
The Chicago Surrealist Group was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in July 1966 by Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Bernard Marszalek, Tor Faegre and Robert Green after a trip to Paris in 1965, during which they were in contact with André Breton. Its initial members came from far-left or anarchist backgrounds and had already participated in groups IWW and SDS; indeed, the Chicago group edited an issue of Radical America, the SDS journal, and the SDS printshop printed some of the group's first publications.
Penelope Rosemont is a visual artist, writer, publisher, and social activist who attended Lake Forest College. She has been a participant in the Surrealist Movement since 1965. With Franklin Rosemont, Bernard Marszalek, Robert Green and Tor Faegre, she established the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1966. She was in 1964-1966 a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as the Wobblies, and was part of the national staff of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967-68. Her influences include Andre Breton and Guy Debord of the Situationist International, Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons.
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy, known as just Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.
Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory, mainly developed by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians in the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their work often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting one's self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging.
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the incredible accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Yvan Goll was a French-German poet who was bilingual and wrote in both French and German. He had close ties to both German expressionism and to French surrealism.
Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, a slave in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.
Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
100 Greatest African Americans is a biographical dictionary of one hundred historically great Black Americans, as assessed by Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante in 2002. A similar book was written by Columbus Salley. First published in 1992, Salley's book is titled The Black 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential African-Americans, Past and Present.
20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck, revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
For a history of Afro-Caribbean people in the UK, see British African Caribbean community.
Suzanne Césaire, born in Martinique, an overseas department of France, was a French writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. Her husband until 1963 was the poet and politician Aimé Césaire.
Tropiques was a quarterly literary magazine published in Martinique from 1941 to 1945. It was founded by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and other Martinican intellectuals of the era, who contributed poetry, essays, and fiction to the magazine. While resisting the Vichy-supported government that ruled Martinique at the time, the writers commented on colonialism, surrealism, and other topics. André Breton, the French leader of surrealism, contributed to the magazine and helped turn it into a leading voice of surrealism in the Caribbean.