INTRODUCTION 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 rom before the official beginnings of the Surrealist movement, its future F 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. 1 Susan R. Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and The Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1990), xv-xvi. 2 Jean Schuster officially announced that ‘historical surrealism’ was over in Le Monde, on October 4, 1969. 1 Synthetic readings of the aesthetic and the political currents of Surrealism are relatively rare. Consistent with this general paucity there have been only a few attempts to reconcile the political and aesthetic aspects of Surrealism’s encounters with ‘the cultural Other’ and, as yet, few attempts to theorise these as a mode of cultural critique that prefigured or approximated a ‘post-colonialist’ discourse, poetics and aesthetics. To date, postcolonial studies have seldom been in productive conversation with Surrealism. A reason could be that Surrealism has been discredited from many sides, with Marxist intellectuals denying its revolutionary force and, more latterly, cultural theorists denouncing its ‘primitivism’. Both discourses feed into postcolonial studies. Within literary scholarship there are studies relating to Surrealism and post-colonialism: a number of scholars have approached the writings of black poets and intellectuals who became Surrealists or were deeply influenced by Surrealism, but these are for the most part specialised historical studies of individual trajectories rather than studies of shared ideas. Carrie Noland writes, To a greater extent than has been recognized, surrealism and the debates it ignited played a large role in the development of a postcolonial theory in both French and English traditions. For critics from Sartre to Fanon to Said, surrealism represents the pinnacle of antinarrative poetics, the poetics of the nondescriptive, nonmimetic, and nonethnographic. When Fanon states in Wretched of the Earth that a poetry ‘full of images’ is ‘a blind alley’, and when Said, forty years later, reiterated in Culture and Imperialism that poetry wields a nonteleological, ‘nomadic, migratory, and anti- narrative energy,’ the type of poetic language being singled out – either to be rejected or celebrated – is one that cannot be ‘exhausted’ by recourse to its ‘literal meaning,’ it is a surrealist language that swerves away from ‘the reality of its content’ (Breton, ‘Misère de la poésie’).3 In Surrealism pictorial and poetic composition are not distinct or discrete activities as both are modes of expression that engage in ‘la poésie’: for example, Breton grounded Ernst’s collage activities within the literary tradition that claims Lautréamont and Rimbaud as its founding fathers.4 Nonetheless, much subsequent commentary and critique of Surrealism has stuck to disciplinary lines. As well as in tracts and poetic works, Surrealism’s anti-colonial position was manifest in their periodicals, objects and exhibitions. There has been some attention to these, but the approaches tend to be focused on particular episodes. 3 Carrie Noland, ‘Red Front/Black Front, Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon,’ Diacritics Volume 36, Number 1 (Spring 2006), 64 – 84, at 75. 4 Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 3 – 12 and passim. 2 The primary goal for this thesis then is to present a long view of Surrealism’s anti- colonialism, as it was realised in the movement’s diverse outputs. I have underpinned much of the formal discussion with references to concepts about space and subjectivity that are, in my opinion, intrinsic to the formal play of terms in Surrealist modes of collage and détournement. The aim here is to trace a long line of development through Surrealism, pinpointing its modes of anti-colonial signification. In the first six chapters, the thesis delineates the development of Surrealist anti- colonial sentiment from the movement’s inception until a point in time close to the death of André Breton, thereby paving the ground for a productive link to be made between Surrealism and postcolonial theory. By dint of his longstanding adherence to Surrealism and his keen exchanges with other thinkers, not just his position as founder and leader of the movement, Breton’s place in the narrative of Surrealism’s anti-colonialism is nodal. He was receptive to radical thinking and alert to the ideas of others, even in the face of intense personal and ideological differences. Figures of looser and shorter adherence to the Surrealist movement made signal contributions to its philosophical and political debates and its anti-colonial stance: such luminaries as Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and Aimé Césaire were highly influential, and arguably more identifiable as anti-colonial thinkers than Breton. While I have neither the space to roundly elucidate their anti-colonial thought in all aspects, nor to outline their biographical connections to Surrealism in great detail, I have signalled the importance of these and other figures by focussing on key aspects of their thinking. My aim has been to point to ways in which their ideas inflected the politics and poetics of Surrealist anti-colonialism and, concomitantly, to emphasise their connectedness and indebtedness to Surrealism. I have tended to focus on points of intersection between thinkers: Breton’s path crosses those of all the others and thus provides much of the connective tissue for my narrative. At the time of writing, two monographs relating to Surrealism and colonialism have been published in English. Louise Tythacott’s Surrealism and the Exotic, of 2003, is a work that is equivocal about Surrealism’s anti-colonialism, and is not intended as an account of Surrealism’s formal innovation.5 David Bate’s Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, of 2004, emphases the deconstructive effects of Surrealist photography, presenting a much more positive 5 Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 3 and original view of Surrealism as a mode of dissent against colonialism, its temporal parameters though are confined to the 1920s and Thirties.6 To reappraise Surrealism in terms of its anti-colonialism entails a deliberate reframing of it as an object of analysis and a reinterpretation of data, much of which has already been analysed. Taking a lens to Surrealism’s anti-colonialism demands identifying fixed ideas and interrogating them. To date, scholarly inattention to Surrealism’s anti-colonialism is the result of restrictive conceptual framing by dominant methodologies that gave their stamp to post-war reception and interpretation of Surrealism. Pens were pushed according to the energies of doctrinaire Marxism, and post-Marxist tendencies in Frankfurt School criticism, Existentialism, and Greenbergian formalism. Later critiques of Surrealism were propelled by certain brands of liberal feminism, post-structuralism and postmodernist perspectives. These theoretical prisms have largely dictated conceptions of the relationship between politics and art, and the uptake of restricted conceptions of Surrealism has been widespread. Within dominant discourses, there is a fixed idea that Surrealism arose as a revolutionary energy in response to the First World War, and then degenerated into a de-politicised period artistic style prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. In this narrative of early demise, a deciding moment is the split that occurred in the movement with the Second Manifesto in 1929. According to the doxa, this ruction cleaved the movement into Bretonian idealism versus Bataillan materialism. Such simplifications have generated a series of partial and partisan perspectives on Surrealism, many of which have been unaccommodating to its objects and poetic writing and especially inattentive to the complex developments in Surrealist expression after the mid 1930s. Post 1935, irrespective of its estrangement from the Communist Party, the Surrealist movement continued to issue politically motivated tracts, and there were profitable collaborations between Breton and Bataille, and interchanges between their ideas. Moreover, Breton and Bataille found themselves allied in a debate against Jean-Paul Sartre in the post-war era about