Surrealism first appeared in France as a radical literary and artistic response to World War I, challenging Western cultural certainties about capitalism, culture, and objective reality. In the 1930s and 1940s Surrealism “entered into a magnetic exchange with Négritude [which] advocated for the legitimacy, specificity, and autonomy of Black civilizations, worldviews, and cultures. In Surrealism, Négritude found a consonant spirit of…rebellion, as well as an effective methodology for refuting the colonial world order” (Yasmina Price, Art in America, 2015). In this course, we’ll explore both French Surrealism and Afro-Surrealism, and the precursor movements out of which they grew, including work by poets and writers like Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Jamaica Kincaid, Federico Garcia Lorca, Stephane Mallarme, Toni Morrison, Arthur Rimbaud, and others as well as visual artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dali, Ben Enwonwu, Frida Kahlo, and Alice Rahon. We’ll examine the ways that surrealist writers and artists connect the subconscious with the everyday in works that challenge and transform conventional ideas of voice, image, story, music, culture, history, identity, power, and reality. We’ll discuss how surrealist writers and artists create radical visions of mortality and love, the mysterious and the irrational, the self and society. We’ll read for pleasure, inspiration, and understanding while asking ourselves how we, as writers and artists, can make use of surrealist strategies to disrupt our own boundaries and stretch our own artistic practices.

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