Afro-Surrealism
Afro-Surrealism is a genre or school of art and literature. In 1974, Amiri Baraka used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote "The Afro-surreal Manifesto" in which he says: "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist ...." The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto lists ten tenets that Afro-Surrealism follows including how "Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past", and how "Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it".
Afro-Surrealism, is practiced and embodied in music, photography, film, the visual arts, poetry and fiction. Notable practitioners and inspirations of Afro-Surrealism include Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, René Ménil, Kool Keith, Terence Nance, Will Alexander, Kara Walker, Samuel R. Delany, Donald Glover and Romare Bearden.
Influence
D. Scot Miller penned "The Afro-surreal Manifesto" for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in May, 2009. Until that time, the term "Afro-surreal Expressionism" was used solely by Amiri Baraka to describe the writings of Henry Dumas. Later that year, Miller spoke with Baraka about extending the term by shortening the description. It was agreed by the two of them that "Afro-surreal" without the "expressionism" would allow further exploration of the term. Afro-surrealism may have some similar origins to surrealism in the mid-1920s, in that an aspect of it Négritude came after André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, but as Leopold Senghor points out in Miller's manifesto, "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical."Afro-Surrealism is directly connected to black history, experience, and aesthetics, particularly as affected by Western culture. British-Nigerian short story writer Irenosen Okojie describes the genre:
Afro-Surrealism more specifically incorporates aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and Black Radical Imagination as described by Robin D. G. Kelley in his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and further with his Afro-surreal historical anthology, Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire's discussion of the "revolutionary impetus of surrealism" in the 1940s.
Black Francophone literary productions
The productions of Black Francophone Caribbean writers during the 1930s and 1940s may be considered Afro-Surreal however the writers themselves identified as Surrealist.Suzanne Césaire, a surrealist thinker and partner of Aimé Césaire, was an important figure in the history of the Afro-surreal aesthetic. Her quest for "The Marvelous" over the "miserablism" expressed in the usual arts of protest inspired the Tropiques surrealist group, and especially René Ménil. Ménil says in "Introduction to the Marvelous" :
Suzanne Césaire's proclamation, "Be in permanent readiness for The Marvelous", quickly became a credo of the movement; the word "marvelous" has since become recontextualized with regard to contemporary black arts and interventions.
In his 1956 essay for Présence Africaine, Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis wrote: "What, then, is the Marvellous, except the imagery in which a people wraps its experience, reflects its conception of the world and of life, its faith, its hope, its confidence in man, in a great justice, and the explanation which it finds for the forces antagonistic to progress?" In his work, Alexis is seen to have an acute sense of reality that is not unlike that of traditional surrealism, and his coining of the term "Marvelous Realism" reflects his influence by the earlier works of the Négritude/Black Surrealist Movement.
Development
The term "Afro-surreal Expressionism" was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1974 essay on Black Arts Movement avant-garde writer Henry Dumas. Baraka notes that Dumas is able to write about ancient mysteries that were simultaneously relevant to the present day. Comparing Dumas' writing to "Toni Morrison's wild, emotional 'places'," Baraka writes that "oth utilize high poetic description—language of exquisite metaphorical elegance, even as narrative precision". But, for Baraka, this "language tells as well as decorates":The world of Ark of Bones, for instance, shares a black mythological lyricism, strange yet ethnically familiar! Africa, the southern U.S., black life and custom are motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history.
Dumas, therefore, was—"despite his mythological elegance and deep signification"—still "part of the wave of African American writers at the forefront of the '60s Black Arts Movement". Precisely because of its strangeness and its deformation of reality, Dumas work bears a deep political truth: "The very broken quality, almost to abstraction, is a function of change and transition."
The future-past
Unlike Afro-Futurism which speculates on possibilities in the future, Afro-surrealism, as Miller describes, is about the present. "Rather than speculate on the coming of the four horseman, Afrosurrealists understand that they rode through too long ago. Through Afro-surrealism, artists expose this form of the future past that is right now."The everyday lived experience
According to Terri Francis: "Afro-surrealism is art with skin on it where the texture of the object tells its story, how it weathered burial below consciousness, and how it emerged somewhat mysteriously from oceans of forgotten memories and discarded keepsakes. This photograph figures Afro-surrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky."Irensonen Okojie wrote of the genre's flexibility have a relationship to life's breadth:
Present day realism
In the manifesto from which present day Afro-surrealism is based, writer D. Scot Miller states in a response to Afrofuturism:"Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow's-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past."
As "The Afro-Surreal Manifesto" and Afro-futurism come to the forefront in artistic, commercial and academic circles, the struggle between the specific and "the scent" of present-day manifestations of black absurdity has come with it, posing interesting challenges to both movements. For Afrofuturists, this challenge has been met by inserting Afrocentric elements into its growing pantheon, the intention being to centralize Afrofuturist focus back on the continent of Africa to enhance its specificity. For the Afro-surrealists, the focus has been set at the "here and now" of contemporary Black arts and situations in the Americas, Antilles, and beyond, searching for the nuanced "scent" of those current manifestations.