Tone Meikle

12/19/22
Culture & Anti-Colonialism

How Did Surrealists and Anti-Colonialists Fight Together?

Prominent throughout the history of multiple anticolonial movements was the artistic, almost dreamlike flourish in which poets, authors, and the like envisioned a post-colonial world – in which the machinations and limitations of colonial life have given way to the anti-colonial ideals of unity, cultural freedom, and peace. A prominent feature of the artistic work in the movement, it shares many qualities with surrealist artwork and writing, particularly the shifting away from the Eurocentric ideals of being and a focus on a higher, more enlightened state of existence outside of the confines of colonialism. The newfound artistic movement – inspired by the nonsensicality of Dadaism – was notable for its emphasis on the automatic, dreamlike machinations of the mind in creating art. The movement gained traction as a response to the “rationalism” given as an excuse for the widespread brutality and death caused by World War I. As a means of pushing back against the unjustified sense of national pride, and to partially condemn the acceptance of pain and suffering as a rational, logical part of the world, a hallmark of the surrealist movement became the focus on the irrational, the illogical, and subconscious desires that inhabit the mind. In his 1924 publication, “Manifestoes of Surrealism,” the writer André Breton describes the term as a notch above reality – a surreality in which the logical borders of the mind are stripped away and the underlying psychic processes are given weight and form. Just a decade later, in 1934, Aime Césaire coined the term “Negritude” to describe the ongoing movement by black literary creatives to affirm their own identities in a world splintered and fractured by colonialism. In the throes of sociopolitical systems that actively dehumanized native and enslaved populations, turning them into commodified objects and property, not just to individuals but to the colonial regimes that took control of their livelihoods, the negritude movement was a means for black artists to stand against this regime and make their thoughts, dreams, and desires known as disenfranchised people. The bizarre nature of the surrealist movement greatly inspired and influenced Césaire and his work as part of the negritude movement, while the difficult, resounding struggle against colonialism inspired the work and political motivations of Breton as a notable head of the surrealist movement. However, even outside of the confines of Césaire and Breton, a large slew of surrealist artists took upon the anticolonial struggle into their work, sometimes through automatist writing, bizarre juxtaposition, or primitivist rendering in painted work or through train-of-thought writing and poetry that sought to expose the anticolonial dream and give it form.

The connection between the two groups and their most prominent historical figures is no coincidence, and their shared experiences as artists and political activists speak a great deal about the importance that these movements had in each other’s successes. The ultimate goal of both surrealists and anti-colonialists was to rise above their respective worlds through transformative, revolutionary action -- not impossible or unfeasible goals. Still, without an organized movement at the helm, they would never come to fruition. This paper examines the ideological correlation between the two spheres, how said correlation manifests in both their artistic and political endeavors, the shared political activism between the two fields, and the culmination of their cooperative efforts.

        To begin, we’ll look at the ideological bases for surrealism and anti-colonialism, as the common ground between them is much shorter than one would immediately expect. Between the desire to abandon the “logical and rational” that precedes surrealism and the desire to upend the structures of the colonial state that precedes anti-colonialism is a common ideological base: Marxist communism.

A subtle critique of capitalist society is present in ‘Barriers’, a short exquisite-corpse exercise by Breton and Philippe Soupault featuring two upper-class individuals on a night out, discussing the nature of their cultural sphere. During their stroll, they toss a cigarette into a beggar’s cap, just to “ sing,  in [their] falsetto voice, the love songs that the academic journals regularly rejected,” displaying the cognitive dissonance of the elite who strived to engage in the artistic (Breton & Soupault 39). As they look upon their world of technological advancement and societal elegance, they realize how fundamentally lacking in empathy and kindness it is, but in the same breath, they choose to demean those who fall under the same umbrella of “lesser” and “worthless” that they do. Many of Breton & Soupault’s works feature similar lamentations about the “modern” world and how natural beauty and interpersonal relationships are depreciated, with the cold, logical structure of the world being held in the highest regard; intelligence, power, and capital precede humanity, and so the very nature of humanity is devalued.

        The aspirational, dream-reflective nature of surrealism was undercut by a recognition of the faults of the capitalist system. Interspersed throughout the published “Manifestoes of Surrealism” – a group of texts about the nature of the art movement collected and published by Andre Breton – are references and calls to action ripped from the Communist Manifesto. In one such text, “On The Time When The Surrealists Were Right”, a group of surrealist writers made their distaste for the capitalist state extremely clear, stating that they are interested “only in the development of [artistic] culture, and this very development necessitates above all the transformation of society through proletarian Revolution,” in which the spheres of creativity and community expressed are held above that of profit (Breton 243). One of the most prominent social critiques shared amongst the surrealists was a distaste for the capitalistic nationalism present in Europe. In the wake of sociopolitical strife pre-WWII, where racism and antisemitism were running rampant and colonial power was still being fought for by the European elite, surrealists were baffled by the idea that the public still had faith in their nations or the capitalist systems that they used to justify this complete disarray. They saw this means of living as counterintuitive to a meaningful existence, not just as people, but as artists as well – if everyone is content with being categorized, put into boxes of utility, and forced into roles of either subservience or domination, there is no real growth or change that can be made as a society – and the prospects of capital gain sat at the very center of it all. To be a surrealist meant acting outside of the “logical” systems that made it normal and necessary to be a part of the capitalist system – it meant pushing against the idea that one has to be profitable to be worth anything, an ideal shared in spades by the communist parties at the time – it was because of this that surrealists took upon the communist ideal as a part of their movement.

        A consistent convention throughout anticolonial writing was the application and analysis of Marxist/Communist concepts. There was not just an acknowledgment of the proletariat and bourgeoisie classes and the inherent imbalance of power held between the two groups, but the recognition that capitalism as a structure maintains colonial systems like racial/cultural divisions. As Cesaire points out in his Discourse on Colonialism, the societies that suffered under colonial rule lived lives that were antithetical to the exploitative ethos of capitalism, as they were “communal societies, never societies of the many for the few [...] democratic societies, [...] cooperative societies, fraternal societies,” and their ability to thrive and grow as unified societies were ripped from them by imperialist rule (Césaire 44). The close relationship between capitalism and racism is what breeds colonialism – as colonizing countries attempted to increase their national wealth, they chose to dehumanize other entire civilizations to justify their status not just as working classes, but as the colonized – nations that would supposedly be made “better” under colonial rule. Initially, this framework is analogous to the bourgeoisie-proletariat relationship that Marx describes in his writings, and he counters it with the recognition that the proletariat must rise together, as a unified class, and fight for the respect and dignity as human beings that they deserve by seizing the means of production. This same conclusion has been reached by anti-colonial writers and thinkers like Frantz Fanon, but with an important ideological addition – the facet of race. Simply owning the means of production cannot be enough if the colonized will still be dehumanized and treated as less than people; there needs to be racial consciousness in conjunction with class consciousness for communism to work under an anti-colonial framework. While communist writings often criticize class structures in an amorphous sense that capitalism has created, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue, [as] it is not just the concept of the pre-capitalist society, so effectively studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here,” but the fight and liberation of the colonized people that inherently embodies the communist framework (Fanon 5). What differentiates the European conceptions of communism from its recontextualization in anticolonial circles was the application of race and colonial structures, which brought the anti-colonial movement to its natural conclusion – the destruction of the colonial state would need to go hand in hand with the destruction of capitalism.

Directly and indirectly, the surrealist and anti-colonialist spheres crossed paths and influenced each other’s artistic and political endeavors. This symbiotic relationship operated on both an individual scale, with certain themes permeating the work of particular artists, and an organizational scale, with members of the two schools of thought coming together to create working coalitions, publishing companies, and prominent art collectives. However, upon closer inspection, the correlation between surrealism and anti-colonial movements is much less organizational and more emblematic of the decolonial struggle as a whole. The work of entire surrealist collectives was less politically active than that of anticolonial movements – they mostly showed support at public events and gatherings, even going so far as to proclaim their allegiance with the colonized people in their fight against colonialism. The impact that their artistic work had was much more prominent, as it allowed for anticolonial writers, particularly those in the negritude movement, to elevate beyond the efforts of their European contemporaries and spread their message forth.

To elaborate on the noted influence of surrealism on the negritude movement, we return to Aime Césaire and his acknowledgment of European surrealism. Since the negritude movement was not established until some decades after the surrealists made their mark, it was not out of the question that surrealist work had made its way into the hands of the negritude authors, giving them a new perspective with which to assess their work and assert themselves into the artistic fray. Although French surrealism was more focused on the “logical” phenomena that affected European life, it was an extremely useful literary tool for the negritude movement, as “the poetic “weapons” associated with Surrealism were not in themselves sufficient for the revolutionary overthrow that decolonization demanded, but they could certainly identify the enemy and thus initiate the call to marronage,” pushing other colonized people to action and encouraging them to fight back against the colonial regime (Eburne 350). In this sense, surrealism was not so much a divining rod as a guiding tool – the train-of-thought style of writing and thinking, when put into the hands of a negritude artist, could potentially lead them to a place of artistic and personal enlightenment regarding the colonial condition. Cesaire recalled that enlightenment in an interview with René Depestre: “Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for [...] in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation [...] if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces [..] if we break with [French customs], if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black,” a statement demonstrating the effective interaction between the surrealist mindset and the decolonial mindset (Césaire 83). Surrealist writing in the hands of the French was enough to call into question the nature of the capitalistic regime that the Europeans lived under, but in the hands of black writers, it was able to upend the entire system through the written form due to the experience of the colonized adding weight to their condemnation of the colonial regime.

The shadow of French colonialism was especially prominent in the Caribbean, as anti-colonial writers native to the island range sought to organize and fight back through the negritude movement. Anti-colonial writers who employed surrealist techniques were able to elevate their writing, “the dialectical construction of an emancipatory politics [...] of dynamic, volatile forms and solidarities,” meaning that artists and readers alike could use surrealist work to envision a postcolonial future (Eburne 350). In this, surrealist writing became a vehicle for anti-colonial praxis - the writings of the colonized already worked to rally together the marginalized under a unified cause, but the usage of the colonizer’s intellectual/artistic tools allowed their work to gain a larger reach, to rise above the standard for cultural legitimacy set by the colonizers. As Fanon writes in “Wretched of the Earth”, the first developmental stage in colonized literature is where the colonized intellectual “[proves] he has assimilated the colonizer's culture [as] his works correspond point by point with those of his metropolitan counterparts, [his] inspiration is European and his works can be easily linked to a well-defined trend in metropolitan literature,” and it is from this step that the colonized writer can ingratiate themselves with their culture, and embolden themselves to engage with the colonial struggle in a more active manner (Fanon 158 - 159). In this, it was Caribbean surrealism that was the divining rod – it was the work of Caribbean surrealists that helped lay the foundation for revolution to begin; through their artistry, colonized people could take a new look at their conditions, at their relationship to the colonial structure and the potential world they could live in outside of it. If that work could be propagated and spread amongst colonized people, then there would be nothing to stop the necessary leap from anti-colonial thought to decolonial activism.

The endorsement and collaboration of the literary magazine Tropiques by European surrealists helped establish Caribbean surrealists as legitimate political and artistic voices. In the mid-1940s, while the pair worked as teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, Aime and Suzanne Césaire founded the magazine, showcasing works by Martinican poets and authors. The purpose of Tropiques was to push back against French colonialism by uplifting the voices of Martinican writers. The written works present in the magazine utilized multiple artistic forms, including surrealism and primitivism, an art form recognized for its emphasis on a more simplistic, “primitive” form of living, separate from the violently established and unnecessary “advancements” of European society. The work circulated primarily amongst colonized people through Caribbean publishing networks, but it came into the hands of Andre Breton through his time in Martinique, as he sailed to the island to escape the destruction of WWII; while it took some time for the two writers to engage with one another on an interpersonal level, it had turned out that Breton discovered his work through a copy of Tropiques that he stumbled upon in a haberdashery shop, in a serendipitous series of events that put Césaire on his radar. As Celia Britton points out in her work, “How to Be Primitive”, the circumstances of Breton's discovery of Aimé Césaire “set the scene for Césaire to be presented to the French surrealists as an authentically naïve, 'primitive' genius,” in which the work of Césaire and other Caribbean surrealists increased in legitimacy amongst European surrealist circles (Britton 171). Breton took it upon himself to help spread Tropiques, distributing it throughout circles of European surrealists, eventually hosting multiple showcases of Caribbean surrealist work in both Haiti and France; the struggle of the colonized could then be co-opted by the surrealist movement, allowing them to assist in the fight against the French imperialist regime. The European endorsement of anti-colonial work didn't end with Tropiques, as one of Breton’s speeches, “For the Defense of Liberty,” actually contained a selection of Cesaire’s writings, “explicitly [invoking] Césaire’s depiction of colonialism as a violent disruption of Indigenous culture, [and] whose distribution he calls a ‘spiritual weapon par excellence,’” reinforcing Fanon’s conception of the colonized writer’s work having a prominent impact on the wills of colonized people (Eburne 351 - 352). However, Breton’s endorsement was met with a significant hurdle; he was unable to communicate with several Caribbean intellectuals, as a great deal of them did not speak French. This, compounded by the fact that many of the written works in Tropiques weren't written in French, highlighted a bigger problem with Breton’s engagement with anti-colonial work, namely that his appreciation of anti-colonial work contained a particular aspect of the colonizer’s mindset – the separation of oneself from the “other”.

        Ironically, it was Breton’s international endeavor that exposed a major fault in the relationship between European Surrealists and the colonized artists and writers that they supported – the imbalance between the artistic colonizers and the artistic colonized never went away, nor was it properly addressed or deconstructed by the most prominent surrealists, like Breton. Despite their political support for anti-colonial movements, the surrealists contributed to intellectual colonialism in their practiced fetishization of the exotic. While fighting for the freedom of colonial states, they proceeded to mythologize these countries, othering them in their artistic and political pursuits. Essentially, “the appeal of far-off lands pertains more to myth than to a true knowledge of unfamiliar cultures founded upon a dialogue,” rendering European surrealists as mere spectators and voyeurs to the anti-colonial cause rather than organizers and activists. Breton’s trips to the Caribbean, the Americas, and Africa were prime examples – in which “the most fertile exchanges and encounters between European surrealists and fellow artists abroad took place not in France at the movement's geographic center, but at its edges,” where it had less staying power or organizational marks (Antle et. al 2). For what it’s worth, Breton’s interest and appreciation of negritude and anti-colonial activism were not empty and hollow, but his involvement in the recognition of Tropiques and his denouncement of France’s status as a colonial, imperialist power was lacking. Conversely, Césaire did appreciate the surrealist movement for giving him and other negritude authors the opportunity to put forth their ideals in a widespread format, strengthening their movement. However, the ideological basis of surrealism was tainted by the same breed of European intellectualism that allowed racism and colonialism to last for so long. The combination of Freud’s psychoanalytical influence and the attraction of the surrealists to the strange and otherworldly culminated in “a preponderance of metaphors of invasion, conquest, and travel, and worked together to orient the movement's ultimate intention to reclaim the surreal by way of systems,” in which surrealists simultaneously appropriated the work of non-European cultures in the same way that European ethnographers would categorize and decontextualize the works of colonized people for the sake of scientific study (Scott 30). Despite the influence and support given to the anti-colonial cause by European surrealists, the inherent power imbalance between the two groups – which culminated in a noticeable gap in experience and understanding – would always prevent meaningful activism on behalf of the surrealists and insightful discourse between the two groups. In this, the two groups are left as the colonized artists and the contemporary colonizers.

        Throughout all of this, surrealist and anti-colonial art and activism have been intertwined in myriad ways since their respective inceptions. Both groups have ideological roots in Marxist communism, with their secondary goals as movements being the complete dismantling of the capitalist state. Whereas the surrealists desired to create a world in which the capitalist hegemony would no longer stifle the creation of art, anti-colonialists wanted to destroy the class system that sought to justify the suffering and dehumanization of colonized people through capitalism. It is because of this overlap in ideology that surrealist and anti-colonial art shared a common thread of critiquing and deconstructing the faults in capitalist societies, with the main difference being that anti-colonial work could use the techniques developed in surrealist writing to rally the colonized people together as a collective. Through the establishment of multiple negritude and surrealist publications in colonized countries, as well as the endorsement and assistance of European surrealists to spread their message and their art, this facet of anti-colonial activism was able to widen its reach and its impact on the colonial structure through acknowledgment of a decolonial future.

While surrealism is a primarily artistic movement and anti-colonialism is a primarily political one, the connections between the two cannot be dismissed as coincidental or happenstance; their oppositional stances to the European imperial hegemony simultaneously held ideological, active, and practical overlap. However, in light of the lack of proper understanding that the most prominent European surrealists had of the experiences of the colonized people – despite their support for their cause – the impact of the surrealist art form needs to be examined separately from that of the surrealist movement. Despite their shared qualities, the surrealists’ activism could not go further than their own (ironically) limited worldviews. Surrealists and anti-colonialists were fighting for the same future with different experiences to draw from; this does not make the surrealists utterly useless in their activism or the anti-colonialists a monolithic paradigm of unmitigated success, it means that their cooperation required a proper centering of the colonial experience and the importance of an anti-colonial fight. In the wake of widespread anti-racist and anti-colonial movements in our current lives, we as scholars, artists, and activists have to be wary of our involvement in movements that do not center us as the focal point and remember to uplift and center the voices of the marginalized as they talk on their own experiences, whether or not they use our tools to do so.

Works Cited

Antle, Martine, and Katharine Conley. “Introduction: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism.” South

Central Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–7. JSTOR,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/44016874. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022.

Eburne, Jonathan P. “Decolonial Surrealism.” Surrealism, edited by Natalya Lusty, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp. 342–362. Cambridge Critical Concepts.

Césaire, Aime. “Discourse on Colonialism.” Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Fanon, Frantz, 1925-1961. “The Wretched of the Earth.” New York, Grove Press, 1968.

Breton, André, 1896-1966. “Manifestoes of Surrealism.” Ann Arbor. University of Michigan

Press, 1972.

Scott, D. M. (1995). “Dreaming the Other: Breton, Césaire, and the Problematics of Influence.”

Romance Quarterly, 42(1), 28–38.

Britton, Celia. “How to Be Primitive: Tropiques, Surrealism, and Ethnography.” Paragraph, vol.

32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 168–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43151917.

Accessed 6 Dec. 2022.