Chapter 17 - Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fictions of Blackness

Summary

This chapter examines the history of Black diasporic fiction in the Atlantic world as it informed, and continues to be informed by, the artistic and geopolitical coordinates of the surrealist movement. From the surrealist interest in and appropriation of Blackness in Jazz-age Paris through the post-WWII development of pan-African and Third World movements, the writing and cultural production of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American intellectuals fuelled the global development of leftist and anti-colonial politics. So too did Black writing and art both inform and, in part, constitute the proliferation of aesthetic radicalism throughout the Atlantic world. This chapter traces the intersecting histories of surrealism, existentialism, and the Black radical tradition through the production of fiction; in doing so it traces the politics of literary activism – as well as the vexed histories of racism, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and erasure – in the work of Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It contends not only that surrealism should be understood as a significant coordinate in the Black radical tradition (as e.g. Robin D.G. Kelley has demonstrated), but also that the surrealist movement is inconceivable without an appraisal of its relation to race, diaspora, and the writing and cultural production of Black intellectuals.