I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so muchmore credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring indreams. It is because man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all the plaything of his memory, and in itsnormal state memory takes pleasure in weakly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, instripping it of any real importance, and in dismissing the only determinant from the point where he thinkshe has left it a few hours before: this firm hope, this concern. He is under the impression of continuingsomething that is worthwhile. Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night.And, like the night, dreams generally contribute little to furthering our understanding

This imagination whichknows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of anarbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of thetwentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.

al life, I mean – that in the end this beliefis lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny,

liberation of the mind as well as the liberation ofartistic expressions has also meant seeking political freedom.

Many surrealist artists have used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and imagesfrom their unconscious minds. Others have wanted to depict dream worlds or hiddenpsychological tensions. Surrealist artists have also drawn inspiration from mysticism, ancientcultures and Indigenous art and knowledges as a way of imagining alternative realities.

“Surrealism is not a style – but a state of mind. It aims to subvert reality. To find the uncannyin the everyday. To tap into our unconscious desires and bring dreams to life. And for manyartists around the world, it has been a way to challenge authority and imagine a new world.”

ournalists, militarists,clergy, litterateurs, and other upholders of the nation’s “glory”

All through the 1920s and 1930s, French newspapers and other periodi-cals routinely printed malicious caricatures of Africans and Asians. A majoroffender in this regard was the journal Documents (not to be confused with thelater Belgian publication of the same name). Edited by Georges Bataille, theFrench Documents was basically an academic review with a strong anti-Marxist,antisurrealist slant. In regard to jazz, its favorites included Paul Whiteman andother white imitators of the genre. Much worse, however, each issue featured alarge, highly offensive smiling “Sambo” advertisement.In contrast, the surrealists in their journals ran images and texts ridiculingwhite pomposity, including photographs of the French bourgeoisie, generals,clergy, and colonial agents—all accompanied by mercilessly mocking head-lines or captions. In articles, too, and their “Review of the Press,” and even intheir poetry, games, and tales, surrealist disdain for white supremacy was loudand clear.

Never Stalinist, the Sur-realist Group was in fact severely critical of Soviet Marxism and especially ofthe French Communists’ vacillating policies.%,

It is surely no mere coincidence, for example, that John Milton—widelyrecognized as the Western world’s #rst all-around revolutionary intellectual,second to none in his outspoken ardor for human freedom—also bestowedupon us the splendid expression “unpremeditated verse,” that is, a spontaneousand wholehearted eruption of the imaginary, clearly pre#guring the practice ofsurrealist automatism.Indeed, all the poets and writers of the past that the surrealists have come torecognize as the movement’s speci#cally English-language precursors—includ-ing Cowper, Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Emily Brönte,Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the whole transcendentalist gang—Whitman, Melville, Hardy, Sterling Brown—are, like their French equiva-lents, characterized by their passion for freedom, their vehement oppositionto slavery, and their rebellion against all forms of oppressive authority andconformity

surrealism is the only major modern cultural movement of Europeanorigin in which men and women of African descent have long participated asequals, and in considerable numbers

Surrealistshave always been unrelenting critics of late capitalism, its mind-numbing con-sumer culture, and its systematized misery, exempli#ed by the military, prison,and advertising industries as well as the billionaires’ meretricious media.

“Drawing correspondences between our realand imaginative experiences”—in the words of poet and anthropologist AyanaKaranja—helps resolve the contradictions between dreaming and waking, sub-jective and objective.!!

urrealists’ concerns are incompara-bly broader, audaciously ranging far beyond traditional literary and artisticcategories

Surrealism’s emancipatory, direct-action approach was emphasized byFrench surrealist Alain Joubert in 1969: “The essential of the surrealist projectis to dismantle all sclerotic categories and inhibiting authority, all forms ofalienation (internal as well as social), and to open—largely, de#nitively, and forall—the #eld of the possible.”!-

These avant-gardes were not only white andEuropean, but also, with the partial exception of Dada, openly Eurocentric.

On the contrary, surreal-ism—an open realism—signi#es more reality, and an expanded awareness of reality,including aspects and elements of the real that are ordinarily overlooked, dis-missed, excluded, hidden, shunned, suppressed, ignored, forgotten, or other-wise neglected

absurd.

The opposite of a bureaucracy, surrealism in-volves no forms to #ll out, no pledges, no membership cards to sign.

“It is the avowed aim of the surrealist movement toreduce and #nally to dispose altogether of the &agrant contradictions that existbetween dream and waking life, the ‘unreal’ and the ‘real,’ the unconscious andthe conscious, and thus to make what has hitherto been regarded as the specialdomain of poets, the acknowledged common property of all.”'

Within the ranks of the internationalmovement, surrealists black, brown, and beige have long been recognized asoutstanding poets, theorists, critics, spokespersons, painters, sculptors, collag-ists, story writers, #lmmakers, playwrights, dancers, and all-around agitators

Inaccessibility, therefore, is not a legitimate excuse for exclusion.It is the aim of this book to introduce readers to the black surrealists

In the vast critical literature on surrealism, all but a few black surrealists havebeen invisible. Despite mounting studies of Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam, TedJoans, and, more recently, Jayne Cortez, academic histories and anthologiestypically, but very wrongly, persist in conveying surrealism as an all-whitemovement, like other “artistic schools” of European origin. Occasional tokenmentions aside, people of color—and more particularly those from Africa orthe Diaspora—have been excluded from most of the so-called standard workson the subject.