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”一词来描述一系列艺术作品，包括亨利大仲马、佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿、让·图默和托尼·莫里森的作品;雅各布·劳伦斯、文森特·史密斯和罗马雷·比尔登的绘画;以及杜克·艾灵顿、塞隆尼斯·蒙克、约翰·柯川和太阳·拉的音乐。2009年，视觉艺术家兼作家D.苏格兰人米勒在他的《非洲超现实主义宣言》中采用了这个术语，指的是非洲散居者与超现实主义联系的更广泛的历史。学者富兰克林·罗斯蒙特和罗宾·D. G.凯利在其开创性的2009年非洲裔超现实主义作品选集;由评论家，如特里弗朗西斯和罗谢尔斯宾塞;在奖学金加勒比超现实主义者，例如，迈克尔理查森和Krzysztof Fijalkowski;在中心，芝加哥超现实主义集团，其中富兰克林罗斯蒙特和佩内洛普罗斯蒙特的关键成员，把非洲裔美国人的音乐和艺术作为超现实主义的活生生的例子;在巴黎超现实主义团体自己的反帝国主义中，例如，1932年的“默罕默德人道主义”声明证明了这一点，该声明的签署者包括马提尼克超现实主义者朱尔斯·蒙内罗特和皮埃尔·约约特;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，但他们作品的意义在很大程度上仍然没有得到充分的探索--无论是在学术机构内部还是外部。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，除了少数几个黑人超现实主义者之外，其他人都是看不见的”，尽管他们在国际上出版过作品，在图书馆里也很容易找到。虽然上述学者已经开始对这些疏忽进行宝贵的纠正，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尤其明显，正如记者Lanre Bakare在2018年指出的那样，21世纪似乎正在整个视觉文化中产生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，我建议调查的方式，我们可以称之为“当代非洲超现实主义”阐明，谈判和挑战当今的种族，性别，性和阶级问题，通过不同的媒体，并将其与早期的非洲超现实主义的表达对话。

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.