Afrosurrealism in Contemporary Visual Culture

1978年，诗人、剧作家和音乐评论家阿米里·巴拉卡（Amiri Baraka）创造了“非洲超现实主义”一词，用来描述一系列广泛的艺术作品，包括亨利·杜马斯（Henry Dumas）、佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿（佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿）、让·图默（Jean Toomer）和托尼·莫里森（Toni Morrison）的作品；雅各布·劳伦斯、文森特·史密斯和罗马·比尔登的画作；以及艾灵顿公爵、塞隆尼斯·蒙克、约翰·科尔特兰和孙拉的音乐。2009年，视觉艺术家兼作家d·斯科特·米勒（D. scott Miller）在他的《非洲超现实主义宣言》（Afrosurreal Manifesto）中使用了这个词，指的是非洲移民与超现实主义之间更广泛的联系历史。学者富兰克林·罗斯蒙特（Franklin Rosemont）和罗宾·d·g·凯利（Robin D.G. Kelley）在2009年开创性的非洲流散超现实主义写作选集中对这些联系进行了进一步研究；特丽·弗朗西斯和罗谢尔·斯宾塞等评论家；获得加勒比超现实主义奖学金，如迈克尔·理查森和克日什托夫·菲贾科夫斯基；富兰克林·罗斯蒙特和佩内洛普·罗斯蒙特是芝加哥超现实主义团体的核心成员，他们把非裔美国人的音乐和艺术作为超现实主义的活生生的例子；巴黎超现实主义团体自己的反帝国主义，例如，1932年的“凶残的人道主义”声明就证明了这一点，其中包括了马丁尼超现实主义者儒勒·蒙内罗和皮埃尔·约约特的签名；最近，通过出版非裔美国超现实主义诗人鲍勃·考夫曼的《诗集》。然而，尽管黑人艺术家、作家、音乐家和知识分子自20世纪初超现实主义运动开始以来就参与了超现实主义的讨论，但他们工作的意义在学术机构内外仍未得到充分发掘。正如罗斯蒙特和凯利所观察到的，在“关于超现实主义的大量批评文献中，除了少数黑人超现实主义者之外，几乎所有人都是隐形的”，尽管他们的作品在国际上出版，在图书馆里随处可见。虽然上述学者对这些疏忽进行了宝贵的纠正，但该领域的历史忽视留下了许多补救工作要做。这些差距在我们的当代时刻尤其明显，正如记者Lanre Bakare在2018年指出的那样，21世纪似乎在整个视觉文化中产生了非洲超现实主义的复兴-从故事片和当代艺术到电视节目和嘻哈音乐视频。因此，我建议研究我们所谓的“当代非洲超现实主义”如何通过不同的媒体表达、协商和挑战当今的种族、性别、性和阶级问题，并将其与早期的非洲超现实主义表达进行对话。

In 1978, the poet, playwright and music critic Amiri Baraka coined the term 'Afro-surreal' to describe a wide range of artistic works, including the writings of Henry Dumas, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and Toni Morrison; the paintings of Jacob Lawrence, Vincent Smith, and Romare Bearden; and the music of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Sun Ra. In 2009, the visual artist and writer D. Scot Miller took up this term in his 'Afrosurreal Manifesto,' with reference to the broader history of Afrodiasporic connections to surrealism. Further work on these connections has been done by the scholars Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley in their groundbreaking 2009 anthology of Afrodiasporic surrealist writing; by critics such as Terri Francis and Rochelle Spencer; in scholarship on Caribbean Surrealists by, for example, Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski; in the centrality that the Chicago Surrealist Group, of which Franklin Rosemont and Penelope Rosemont were key members, placed on African-American music and art as living examples of surrealism; in the Paris Surrealist Group's own anti-imperialism, evidenced in, for instance, its 'Murderous Humanitarianism' statement of 1932, which included among its signatories the Martinican surrealists Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyotte; and, recently, through the publication of the African-American surrealist poet Bob Kaufman's 'Collected Poems.' However, while Black artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals have partaken in surrealist discourse since the movement's inception in the early twentieth century, the significance of their work is still largely underexplored--both within and outside of academic institutions. As Rosemont and Kelley observe, within "the vast critical literature on surrealism, all but a few black surrealists have been invisible," despite being internationally published and readily available in libraries.While the aforementioned scholars have initiated invaluable correctives to these oversights, the field's historical neglect leaves much remedial work to be done. These gaps are felt especially in our contemporary moment, for as the journalist Lanre Bakare noted in 2018, the twenty-first century appears to be yielding a reinvigoration of Afrosurrealism throughout visual culture--from feature films and contemporary art to television shows and hip-hop music videos. As such, I propose to investigate the ways in which what we might call 'contemporary Afrosurrealism' articulates, negotiates and challenges present-day issues of race, gender, sexuality and class through diverse media, and to place this in dialogue with earlier expressions of Afrosurrealism.