fuckademia

Learning about Surrealism and specifically Black Surrealism. Reading a book: Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora by Franklin Rosemont and new crush Robin D.G. Kelley.

Have read so far about sixty out of four hundred pages, though, what is a page. Depends on the typography. Reading on this eReader which at the configured font size brings the whole length to around seven hundred “pages” and the progress to some percentage, thirteen or so.

The company who makes the eReader doesn’t support export of annotations on sideloaded files (this one a generated ePub file from Archive.org). They say it’s by design. They want you to buy books from them. They don’t even carry this one.

Guess what. There is a database in the device. When you plug it into the machine you can go into the database and export the annotations yourself. They’re right there. Fuckers.

Here are a few of them:

but other enemies of surrealism had ways of enforcing their bigotry. In Hitler’s Germany, for example, surrealism in painting and poetry was reviled as degenerate art and officially forbidden, as it was in Franco’s Spain and Hirohito’s Japan.

Significant, too, was Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo. As a story of escape, struggle against injustice, and ultimate revenge, it has never been surpassed.

The works of Alexandre Dumas were also important. Dumas is not only France’s best-known author of African descent, but also France’s best-known author, period.

surrealism’’s precursors — Rimbaud and Lautréamont above all.

Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay

Pierre Yoyotte (1922-1940) did not contribute a text to Légitime Défense, but the articles he published elsewhere assured him a significant place in the history of surrealism.

Low later prepared a collection of their surrealist and Marxist essays, La verdad contempordnea (Contemporary truth, Havana, 1943

to the two Manifestoes of André Breton, to the complete works of Aragon, André Breton, René Crevel, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Péret and Tristan Tzara.

“Revolution Now and Forever!”

In an early and too rarely discussed essay (“Distances,” 142-147), Breton reflects on the problems artists have in bringing their work to the attention of the public. Highly critical of the fact that art had fallen “under the control of businessmen,” he goes on to denounce those “bad places” called “galleries.

enthusiasm for the revolt of And El-Krim and the Rif tribespeople of Morocco in the summer of 1925.7 In a July 15 statement they declared their solidarity with the Riffians and affirmed “the right of peoples, of all peoples, of whatever race” to self-determination.

, André Breton

emphatically anti-Eurocentric.

In the 1950s Low was closely linked to the underground 26th of July movement and helped in the overthrow of dictator Batista.

The most developed of all so-called civilized countries, the United States, is getting ready to murder eight young blacks who are accused, contrary to all evidence, of raping two white prostitutes.

. One of the key elements of surrealist methodology, inherited from the nineteenth-century French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, is Absolute Divergence — divergence above all from the dominant ways of thinking and behaving.

most notably, folklorist Lydia Cabrera

In a1956 essay, “Away with Miserabilism!” Breton defines this new plague as “the depreciation of reality instead of its exaltation

Archibald Motley, from Chicago, spent much of 19291930 in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Cuban poet and revolutionary Juan Brea and his Australian companion, Mary Low.

Georges Bataille not long afterward mended his ways and indeed, by mid-decade had joined André Breton and the surrealists in the formation of an explicitly revolutionary group, Counter-Attack.

Simone Yoyotte Léro was the organizer, but the entire Légitime Defense Group was remarkable. Simone Yoyotte, for example, was by all standards a strikingly original figure. Her poems,

LEGITIME DEFENSE MANIFESTO This is only a preliminary warning. We consider ourselves totally committed. We are sure

museums or other “Art Detention Centers””® (in Ishmael Reed’s apt expression) — but rather as manifestations of visible poetry, objects imbued with spiritual energy and therefore vital elements in daily life.

to liberate the unconscious, they practice hypnosis and dream interpretation as well as automatic writing and drawing. They have discovered new techniques, from frottage and collage to cubomania and prehensilhouette, and have invented games that result in collective poetry. “Drawing correspondences between our real and imaginative experiences” — in the words of poet and anthropologist Ayana Karanja—helps resolve the contradictions between dreaming and waking, subjective and objective.”

Hugo was an early source of the Surrealist Group’s vehement opposition to white supremacy.

THE TRIUMVIRATE OF NEGRITUDE AND LETUDIANT NOIR Sorcerer, release the dreams born here. —Anne Spencer

surrealism does not signify unreality, antireality, the nonsensical, or the absurd. On the contrary, surrealism — an open realism — signifies more reality, and an expanded awareness of reality, including aspects and elements of the real that are ordinarily overlooked, dismissed, excluded, hidden, shunned, suppressed, ignored, forgotten, or otherwise neglected.

“a community of ethical views,” as the Czech surrealist painter Toyen called it in the early 1950

Aimé Césaire,

Langston Hughes also visited Paris. Hughes became a good friend of Louis Aragon and probably met other surrealists at demonstrations, cafes,

psychoanalytic inquiry not as therapy, but, rather, as a subversive activity, a form of criticism, and an aid to humankind’s liberation from repression. They were also impressed by the applications of psychoanalysis to folklore, jokes, the arts, and the whole field of culture.

Wherever western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made.

malicious caricatures of Africans and Asians. A major offender in this regard was the journal Documents (not to be confused with the later Belgian publication of the same name). Edited by Georges Bataille,

The surrealists’ first black hero was undoubtedly Toussaint L’Ouverture,

host of little pigs similar to the flag of the United States”

Enfantin, Flora Tristan, and Saint-Yves dAlveydre, has left a strong impact on the surrealist outlook.

philosophy, magic, myth,

Voyotte Simone Yoyotte (ca. 1910-1933), the first black woman surrealist, was born and grew up in Martinique. Next to nothing is known of her life.

As Paul Eluard puts it in “La suppression de I’ésclavage”: “The supremacy of Europe is based only on militarism and the cross—the cross in the service of militarism. … The white man is nothing but a corpse—a corpse who dumps his garbage under the natives’ noses.”

“First of all we shall ruin this civilization … in which you [bourgeois students] are molded like fossils in shale. Western world, you are condemned to death. We are the defeatists of Europe, so take care—or, rather, laugh at us. We shall make a pact with all your enemies.”

David Gascoyne, the sixteen-year-old cofounder of the Surrealist Group in England in 1936: “It is the avowed aim of the surrealist movement to reduce and finally to dispose altogether of the flagrant contradictions that exist between dream and waking life, the ‘unreal’ and the ‘real’ the unconscious and the conscious, and thus to make what has hitherto been regarded as the special domain of poets, the acknowledged common property of all.”

A later surrealist concept — miserabilism— is also crucial, for it gives a name to the ruling ideologies of our own time, as epitomized in the New World Order, the World Trade Organization, and all the McMiseries of globalization.

Victor Hugo was another influence

Rimbaud’s defiant dissociation from the authoritarianism and hypocrisy of white society —as evidenced by his bold cry, “Je suis négre!” (I am a Negro!) —made a deep impression on the nascent surrealist group, as it would a few years later on Aimé Césaire and his comrades from Martinique, Guyana, and Senegal.

major inspirers, was the poet Arthur Rimbaud

revalorize the wisdom of ancient Egypt.

one of New York’s most notorious eccentrics, the German Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, militant Dadaist poet, artist, and comrade-in-arms of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.

brilliant young Cuban painter Wifredo Lam,

the eccentric dancer Josephine Baker

too, is the fact that the surrealists’ anti-imperialism never wavered. More than five thousand copies of their vehement denunciation of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition were distributed in Paris, mostly in working-class areas.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, the preeminent African American artist in Paris from the 1910s until his death in 1937,

The poet fights for surprise.

Uruguayan-born Isidore Ducasse, who called himself the Comte de Lautréamont. His astonishing book, Les chants de Maldoror (Songs of Maldoror, 1869), is poetry at its most luminous

Césaire, Damas, and Senghor—who in March 1936 started the paper L’Etudiant Noir, long renowned as one of the monuments in the history of Negritude.

Tanner’s influence on young black artists was considerable. His studio on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques was something of a shrine for visiting African Americans,

history, heresy, the exploration of objective chance, sleep and dream, the interplay of dialectics and analogy.

“surrealist Afrocentrism”: a more or less “underground” tradition that extends back to the Gnostics and alchemists and includes Renaissance mages Pico della Mirandola and John Dee, as well as such later figures as Martinez Pasqualis, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, and philologist Fabre d’Olivet (whose play, Idamore, or the African Prince,

Surrealism looks for a transformation of the world. . . . Poetry is the antithesis of prayer.

There is more freedom in a square mile of Paris than in the entire United States. —Richard Wright

surrealism is the only major modern cultural movement of European origin in which men and women of African descent have long participated as equals, and in considerable numbers.

unjustly menaced with the electric chair by Yankee sexual neurosis.

traitors to the white race and avowed enemies of Eurocentrism:

The humorous 1929 “Surrealist Map of the World” — drawn by artist Yves Tanguy— omits almost all of Europe (except Paris) and leaves out the entire United States as well.

Breton told of a dream in which he was Zapata,

challenging gender stereotypes and rejecting the prevailing models of maleness

African art also had a strong impact on emerging surrealism. Surrealists were in fact among the first to defend tribal sculptures,

French occultist Eliphas Lévi,

André Breton and his comrades inherited and expanded the revolutionary Romantic disdain for Progress, Modernity, and the ecocidal technological devastation that smugly persists in calling itself “development.” Surrealists have always been unrelenting critics of late capitalism, its mind-numbing consumer culture, and its systematized misery, exemplified by the military, prison, and advertising industries as well as the billionaires’ meretricious media.

“traitors to everything that is not freedom.”

In 1932, Etienne Léro, a young Martinican poet and philosophy student with eight fellow students—all between twenty and twenty-five years old— formed a group called Légitime Défense (Self-Defense), and published a journal of that name.

“Open the Prisons! Disband the Army!” and “Hands Off Love!”

pioneering African American feminist Anna Julia Cooper,

Légitime Défense was actually closer, in spirit and program, to 1930s Cuban Negrismo

Negro Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard. Praised by her friend Marcus Garvey as one who “thinks sympathetically black,” Cunard had been deeply involved in surrealism since the mid-1920s; many surrealist gatherings were held at her apartment

Indeed, it was in the pages of L’Etudiant Noir that the word “Negritude” (coined by Césaire) first appeared in print.

Moving inspiring words.

Also reading an author Cat shared: Lidia Yuknavitch who writes.

Hours of woman on woman on woman whose regular lives didn’t allow for such wild abandon. Sometimes Hanna’s fist up my cunt Claire’s mouth on mine or me sucking her epic tits. Sometimes Hanna on her stomach me up her ass with a strap-on Claire behind me giving me a reach around — a skill she intuited.

The audio book of W. E. B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America is over thirty hours long. This phone is too old for the Audible app. Can listen in the browser. In the car we have a casette adaptor plugged into a phone adapter plugged into the phone. The sound comes out of the left car door only. Works. Driving three hours a day for the final four of eight weeks of hyperbaric oxygen therapy with Tom and LuAnn Zant in Fort Walton who gave us a bunch of deer meat. So sweet. He loves to hunt. The colder the better. Early mornings watching the woods wake up.

Jose has a tablet installed in his older car, screwed into the dashboard somehow. He can do same for us. Might make sense.

Rivka’s hair lifted into a loose curly bun with the single lock curling down in front of the right ear and three inches down their bare right shoulder. Fuzzy tan lines between neck and shoulders from tank tops in the sun. Bare everything as always all summer. Too hot for otherwise. It’s too late to be awake.

9/06/2025