Afrosurrealism in Contemporary Visual Culture

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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.