Surrealism & Anti-colonialism A Long View

Surrealism & Anti-colonialism A Long View
How we read Surrealism today…is neither a purely textual question nor a purely historical one. It is both; and by the questions we – or I – ask about Surrealist texts are determined both by Surrealism’s history (itself ‘to be read’) and by our (my) own.
– Susan R. Suleiman1
rom before the official beginnings of the Surrealist movement, its future
members denounced European imperialism. Some of the last manifestoes
published by the Parisian Surrealist group supported Vietnamese and Algerian
struggles for independence. From 1919 then, anti-colonialism was a line of critique
that ran through Surrealism during the movement’s first two decades, and continued
through the era of decolonisation after the Second World War until the official
closure of the Surrealism in the1960s.2 Yet this narrative has yet to take shape. It is
not commonly remarked that over a span of more than forty years the Surrealists
published anti-colonial tracts and staunch criticism of the West, but it is routinely
observed that in their collections, exhibitions and artwork they included objects and
referred to the cosmologies of non-Western cultures. This latter tendency is often
dubbed ‘primitivism’ and regarded negatively, and seen in the same light as the
‘primitivism’ of modernist movements that came before Surrealism.
1 Susan R. Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and The Avant-Garde (Cambridge,
Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1990), xv-xvi. 2 Jean Schuster officially announced that ‘historical surrealism’ was over in Le Monde, on
October 4, 1969.
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Synthetic readings of the aesthetic and the political currents of Surrealism are
relatively rare. Consistent with this general paucity there have been only a few
attempts to reconcile the political and aesthetic aspects of Surrealism’s encounters
with ‘the cultural Other’ and, as yet, few attempts to theorise these as a mode of
cultural critique that prefigured or approximated a ‘post-colonialist’ discourse,
poetics and aesthetics. To date, postcolonial studies have seldom been in productive
conversation with Surrealism. A reason could be that Surrealism has been discredited
from many sides, with Marxist intellectuals denying its revolutionary force and, more
latterly, cultural theorists denouncing its ‘primitivism’. Both discourses feed into
postcolonial studies. Within literary scholarship there are studies relating to
Surrealism and post-colonialism: a number of scholars have approached the writings
of black poets and intellectuals who became Surrealists or were deeply influenced by
Surrealism, but these are for the most part specialised historical studies of individual
trajectories rather than studies of shared ideas. Carrie Noland writes,
To a greater extent than has been recognized, surrealism and the debates it ignited played a large role in the development of a postcolonial theory in both French and English traditions. For critics from Sartre to Fanon to Said, surrealism represents the pinnacle of antinarrative poetics, the poetics of the nondescriptive, nonmimetic, and nonethnographic. When Fanon states in Wretched of the Earth that a poetry ‘full of images’ is ‘a blind alley’, and when Said, forty years later, reiterated in Culture and Imperialism that poetry wields a nonteleological, ‘nomadic, migratory, and anti- narrative energy,’ the type of poetic language being singled out – either to be rejected or celebrated – is one that cannot be ‘exhausted’ by recourse to its ‘literal meaning,’ it is a surrealist language that swerves away from ‘the reality of its content’ (Breton, ‘Misère de la poésie’).3
In Surrealism pictorial and poetic composition are not distinct or discrete activities as
both are modes of expression that engage in ‘la poésie’: for example, Breton
grounded Ernst’s collage activities within the literary tradition that claims
Lautréamont and Rimbaud as its founding fathers.4 Nonetheless, much subsequent
commentary and critique of Surrealism has stuck to disciplinary lines. As well as in
tracts and poetic works, Surrealism’s anti-colonial position was manifest in their
periodicals, objects and exhibitions. There has been some attention to these, but the
approaches tend to be focused on particular episodes.
3 Carrie Noland, ‘Red Front/Black Front, Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon,’ Diacritics
Volume 36, Number 1 (Spring 2006), 64 – 84, at 75. 4 Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse.
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 3 – 12 and passim.
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The primary goal for this thesis then is to present a long view of Surrealism’s anti-
colonialism, as it was realised in the movement’s diverse outputs. I have underpinned
much of the formal discussion with references to concepts about space and
subjectivity that are, in my opinion, intrinsic to the formal play of terms in Surrealist
modes of collage and détournement. The aim here is to trace a long line of
development through Surrealism, pinpointing its modes of anti-colonial signification.
In the first six chapters, the thesis delineates the development of Surrealist anti-
colonial sentiment from the movement’s inception until a point in time close to the
death of André Breton, thereby paving the ground for a productive link to be made
between Surrealism and postcolonial theory. By dint of his longstanding adherence to
Surrealism and his keen exchanges with other thinkers, not just his position as
founder and leader of the movement, Breton’s place in the narrative of Surrealism’s
anti-colonialism is nodal. He was receptive to radical thinking and alert to the ideas
of others, even in the face of intense personal and ideological differences. Figures of
looser and shorter adherence to the Surrealist movement made signal contributions to
its philosophical and political debates and its anti-colonial stance: such luminaries as
Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and Aimé Césaire were highly influential, and
arguably more identifiable as anti-colonial thinkers than Breton. While I have neither
the space to roundly elucidate their anti-colonial thought in all aspects, nor to outline
their biographical connections to Surrealism in great detail, I have signalled the
importance of these and other figures by focussing on key aspects of their thinking.
My aim has been to point to ways in which their ideas inflected the politics and
poetics of Surrealist anti-colonialism and, concomitantly, to emphasise their
connectedness and indebtedness to Surrealism. I have tended to focus on points of
intersection between thinkers: Breton’s path crosses those of all the others and thus
provides much of the connective tissue for my narrative.
At the time of writing, two monographs relating to Surrealism and colonialism have
been published in English. Louise Tythacott’s Surrealism and the Exotic, of 2003, is
a work that is equivocal about Surrealism’s anti-colonialism, and is not intended as
an account of Surrealism’s formal innovation.5 David Bate’s Photography and
Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, of 2004, emphases the
deconstructive effects of Surrealist photography, presenting a much more positive
5 Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
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and original view of Surrealism as a mode of dissent against colonialism, its temporal
parameters though are confined to the 1920s and Thirties.6
To reappraise Surrealism in terms of its anti-colonialism entails a deliberate
reframing of it as an object of analysis and a reinterpretation of data, much of which
has already been analysed. Taking a lens to Surrealism’s anti-colonialism demands
identifying fixed ideas and interrogating them. To date, scholarly inattention to
Surrealism’s anti-colonialism is the result of restrictive conceptual framing by
dominant methodologies that gave their stamp to post-war reception and
interpretation of Surrealism. Pens were pushed according to the energies of
doctrinaire Marxism, and post-Marxist tendencies in Frankfurt School criticism,
Existentialism, and Greenbergian formalism. Later critiques of Surrealism were
propelled by certain brands of liberal feminism, post-structuralism and postmodernist
perspectives. These theoretical prisms have largely dictated conceptions of the
relationship between politics and art, and the uptake of restricted conceptions of
Surrealism has been widespread.
Within dominant discourses, there is a fixed idea that Surrealism arose as a
revolutionary energy in response to the First World War, and then degenerated into a
de-politicised period artistic style prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. In
this narrative of early demise, a deciding moment is the split that occurred in the
movement with the Second Manifesto in 1929. According to the doxa, this ruction
cleaved the movement into Bretonian idealism versus Bataillan materialism. Such
simplifications have generated a series of partial and partisan perspectives on
Surrealism, many of which have been unaccommodating to its objects and poetic
writing and especially inattentive to the complex developments in Surrealist
expression after the mid 1930s.
Post 1935, irrespective of its estrangement from the Communist Party, the Surrealist
movement continued to issue politically motivated tracts, and there were profitable
collaborations between Breton and Bataille, and interchanges between their ideas.
Moreover, Breton and Bataille found themselves allied in a debate against Jean-Paul
Sartre in the post-war era about art and politics. Surrealism had indeed been
popularised as a style and a fashion influence in the 1930s, but that should not
obscure the fact that it continued to develop formal strategies, areas of theoretical 6 David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent
(London and New York: Taurus, 2004).
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speculation and staunch political positions. Despite being pilloried on all sides
throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Surrealism remained a future-oriented movement:
its power for dissent, as well as its sense of social mission is clear in its anti-colonial
thrust.
Some of the ideas that emerged in the immediate post-World War II era, and which
have since prevailed in the standard historical accounts of Surrealism and its political
engagement, are interrogated in Chapter One. There, I first take up historical
treatments that present Surrealism as a depoliticised movement after its break with
the Communist Party in 1935. Second, I counter an orthodox view of Surrealism as a
period style, and point to a standard curatorial framework that privileges the visual
forms of Surrealism at the expense of the movement’s critical impetus. Last, the first
Chapter opens onto a discussion of theorists who have debated the historicity of
Surrealism as an avant-garde movement, taking up Peter Bürger’s and Jürgen
Habermas’s related views on the supposed failure of Surrealism, views that gained
much credence in the 1970s and 1980s. Both commentators present highly
pessimistic views of the critical role of ‘post-avant-garde’ or ‘postmodern’ art. I
argue that the methodological frame with which they designate Surrealism as an
‘avant-garde’ negates a notion of artistic agency based on desire over rationalism.
This is an idea perpetuated within some contemporary commentary about Surrealism
and anti-colonialism, distorting the terms of the discussion.
To acknowledge Surrealism’s anti-colonial activities in the latter half of the Thirties
is to counter the claim that Surrealism’s political engagement ceased then. Its anti-
colonial expressions receive only glancing attention in Marxist or Marxist-influenced
accounts, if at all. They have gained some attention though, from scholars of cultural
studies. However, a different idée fixe besets much of the literature from this quarter.
A good proportion of writers who have approached Surrealism’s engagement with
other cultures have dismissed their aesthetic explorations out of hand, by taking the
view that Surrealist anti-colonial political postures are contradicted by their
‘primitivism’.
In Chapter Two, I review this corpus of critical literature. In it I hear echoes of a
debate that peaked earlier, in which there were claims of Surrealism’s purported
misogyny, with similar methodological weaknesses. Comparable to an almost
puritanical sense of offence at the ‘women shot and painted’ in the Surrealist cannon
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of images, there has been a sense of disapprobation expressed over the Surrealists’
penchant for collecting and displaying non–Western objects, and over what they
sometimes enthusiastically referred to as ‘savage art’. Again, this commentary takes
a short view of Surrealism by fixing on its outputs and activities in the 1920s and
early Thirties. Scholars coming from a cultural studies perspective have addressed
Surrealism from what is intended to be a deconstructive standpoint, yet many show a
lack of cognisance of the complexity of Surrealist signification or an unwillingness
or inability to address its formal aspects. Ranjana Khanna acknowledges this lack of
accommodation to Surrealism within post-colonial studies, pointing to an
inhospitality to works of art, and its frequent inability to give a simultaneous analysis
of the political and the aesthetic. Khanna writes,
Much of the scholarship in post-colonial studies, whether in the literary context in which it was initially developed, or in the cultural studies, art history and historiographical fields in which it now finds itself, has often failed to allow for a reading of the aesthetic and the political to occur simultaneously. If the dominant aesthetics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting is considered Orientalist, there has been an acknowledgement of the significance of the dominant ideology that reveals in art retrospectively a colonial legacy. But at times context and identity have begun to overshadow the work, representing a kind of inhospitality to the object under consideration. 7
Here Khanna points to the way that the reading of an object can be sacrificed to a
telos of partisan liberation politics. Whilst the Surrealists’ collection and display of
exotic objects have often been dismissed as ‘primitivism’ and ‘Orientalism’, and the
encounters they have staged with other cultures construed as thoroughly imbricated
by colonialism, it is clear that the attraction that exotic objects held for many
Surrealists went far beyond a pecuniary interest: it reflected not only their
cosmological concern with the power of myth, but a recognition of the power of
objects as points of connection to an imagined, or not–yet–imagined realm. Thus an
element of ambiguity hinges on Surrealism’s encounters with other cultures, which
was manifest in their predilection for exotic objects, but which extended and
deepened to a broader and more speculative exploration of the relations of objects in
space. To simply dismiss their artistic experiments in relation to their election of
non–Western objects for inclusion into their range of ‘Surrealist Objects’ is to ignore
the operation of desire in the Surrealists’ activity. It is also to miss the open-ended
and provisional nature of the Surrealist object.
7 Ranjana Khanna, ‘Latent Ghosts and the Manifesto: Baya, Breton and reading for the
future’, Art History 26, no. 2 (April 2003), 238 – 280.
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Today there certainly are contradictions for us in the Surrealists’ dealings with ‘the
cultural Other’, but there are good reasons to search for the productive aspects of
contradiction in this regard, as we negotiate our supposedly post colonial condition in
the present. ‘The characteristic of Breton is to have held irreconcilable tendencies
firmly together’, says Maurice Blanchot in a sometimes slightly exasperated, but
ultimately very positive, reflective essay on Surrealism. 8 Surrealism supports and
nourishes a high degree of ambiguity as it seeks ‘a certain point of mind in which life
and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the
incommunicable, high and low, cease being perceived as contradictory’.9
Chapter Three draws on theoretical approaches that have attended to the unconscious
pulsation of Surrealism to account for its formal innovations and the way the
Surrealists drew on, and referred to, other cultures.10 These theorists affirm a view
that a variety of Surrealist modes of aesthetic and poetic production contributed
positively to its anti-colonial politics. Rosalind Krauss has made key contributions to
this area of scholarship, as have Hal Foster and James Clifford. Clifford’s seminal
scholarship explores the links between Surrealism and ethnography, and is a
keystone in the literature. In his view, ‘ethnographic Surrealism’ was a discursive
field that permitted radical experimentation with identity, alterity and territoriality,
and thus posed a genuine critique of the European logos. Recent commentators have
provided close descriptive accounts of Surrealist artworks and manifestos, which
have extended the discussion of the radicalism of Surrealist signification and the way
8 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Reflections on Surrealism,’ in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte
Mandell (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 90. 9 André Breton, Les Vases communicants (Paris: des Presses Modernes, 1932), published in
English as Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris, with notes and introduction by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
10 Pivotal Anglophone works that served to redefine the march of Surrealism were Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); and Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). These works have served underscore the profound power of the surrealising unconscious and to mark out a terrain in which Surrealism functions variously as symptom, counter, contradiction, and transgressive ‘other’ to modernism. Subsequent important works, which build upon the scholarly tradition set in play by Krauss and Foster are: Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Caws establishes connections between ‘the look’ – the visual address of Surrealism, and baroque forms of representation. Kirsten Strom, Making History: Surrealism and the Invention of a Political Culture (Maryland, University Press of America, 2002). Strom makes the case that as well as buttressing their project through the self-conscious construction of a group identity (through group portraits and the like), the Surrealists sought to establish a long historical lineage through appropriating historical ‘members’. Thus they sought to depict themselves as heirs to a long proto-Surrealist tradition, but moreover they went about creating a counter canon.
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its poetics reveal and erode received imperialist ideas. A growing branch of
scholarship is tracing the connections between Surrealism and the Négritude
movement. By focusing on the way Surrealism engaged with non-European cultural
forms, this thesis seeks to make a contribution to a seam of revisionist research,
which has its roots in the mid 1980s. The viewpoints drawn on in Chapter Three
permit speculation about whether it is meaningful to speak of a Surrealist post-
colonial aesthetics.
Chapters Four to Six approach Surrealism’s politics and aesthetics by framing a long
view of its anti-imperial, anti-colonial tendencies. These three chapters connect
events and data in the form of tracts, essays, objects and exhibitions, with an
emphasis on Surrealism’s art and design properties, in order to demonstrate that its
use of collage was not at odds with its anti-colonialism, but integral to it. Writers
with other agendas have afforded the same data peripheral glances or focused upon
particular object or episodes, but my attention lies with the play of signification that
occurs in Surrealism’s anti-colonialist gestures, and in describing and analysing their
means as they developed them over time. While Surrealist collage and assemblage is
assuredly well recognised and commonly emulated, Surrealist appropriation and
operations of displacement are more complex than often given credit for. In these
Chapters I have addressed various modalities of Surrealist collage in their use for
social commentary and destabilising effect. Given the forty-year scope of the
trajectory covered in the three central chapters, I have been obliged to present much
of the material in a fairly selective and summary way, but at certain points in the
thesis I have engaged in descriptive analysis
Certain trends emerge in content and form over the different decades. In the 1920s
the Surrealists engaged in a brand of ‘counter-Orientalism’ which drove at the heart
of French nationalism and a broader set of cultural values – religious and racist – that
underpinned France’s ‘civilizing’ colonial mission, with its superficial ethos of
universalism and progressivism. Here we see Surrealism’s anti-Enlightenment values
mobilised for cultural critique, and this is described in Chapter Four, where the
discussion is focused on appropriation, juxtaposition and mimicry, with reference to
Surrealist collecting, early exhibitions, and the design and content of La Révolution
Surréaliste.
Chapter Five focuses on Surrealism’s second decade. The 1930s saw the ‘dissident
Surrealists’ exploring highly disruptive and aggressive discursive practices in the
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periodical Documents, and for the Bretonian group this was a moment of intense
experimentation with objects – exotic and…