Scholars have canonically understood Surrealism as having arrived in the Americas in two principal waves: the first involved the interwar discovery of a largely French avant-garde movement by poets, little magazines, and art-world figures in the US and Latin America; the second describes the influx of European “exiles” who crossed the Atlantic as war refugees during World War II. Surrealism was not, however, a solely Parisian or European movement that washed up on American shores. This chapter proposes instead that “Surrealism” designates a multifarious set of poetic and artistic practices invented by and within the Americas, in exchange with European and non-European arts and ideas. The chapter traces some of the refractions and reverberations of Surrealism throughout the Americas, offering a survey of American surrealisms – from Buenos Aires to Fort de France, from Mexico City to Chicago, from Lima to New York City – that disclose a complex set of intercultural reflections and negotiations among modernist poets, artists, and thinkers.

Chapter Four focuses on the Decadent modernist Harold Acton’s time in China and argues that Acton relies on the concept of kinship as he theorizes cosmopolitanism and transnational contact. Inspired in part by Decadent precursors, such as Vernon Lee, he insists that coming into true communion with other nations requires the eschewal of forms of heteronormative domesticity that might delimit mobility or inhibit openness to foreign experience. However, his work is haunted by anxieties about the slippage between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism, and he turns to kinship metaphors, to the figure of transnational adoption, to think through that slippage. He simultaneously suggests that extrication from conventional familial arrangement facilitates transcultural communion and worries, in his figuring of cultural appropriation as unsuccessful transnational adoption, that true transcultural communion is impossible. In examining the manner in which Acton thinks through and against the concept of kinship while theorizing cosmopolitanism, I highlight the influence on his thinking of women writers and artists, such as Vernon Lee, Nancy Cunard, and Anna May Wong, who shared with Acton a vexed relationship to family and marriage as well as the aspiration to move across national and racial boundaries.