by M Kunda - 2010 - Cited by 3 - Related articles
Habermas regards Surrealism as heir to Baudelaire's 'spirit and discipline of aesthetic ... 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 From 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.
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