“… André Breton […] described surrealism as a minority always “tending toward greater human emancipation,” and went on to add that it is “ceaselessly
renewable” and “acts as a lever.”
“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.” (David Gascoyne)
“In their vehement opposition to white supremacy, the surrealists were in fact
far to the left of the Socialist and Communist parties, in France and elsewhere,
most of which regarded the issue of race as decidedly less important than that of
class. In the collective statements quoted above, the Surrealist Group was very
much at odds with those parties but in close agreement with such renowned
black revolutionary internationalists as George Padmore, Garan Kouyaté, and
C.L.R. James.”
“… surrealists openly defined themselves as “traitors to everything that is not
freedom.”
“the Dictionnaire du surréalisme et ses environs (1982)—by far the best
reference work on the subject—asserts, in the entry for “noir,” that “black has
always been the color of surrealism.”
Invisible Surrealists, Black, Brown, & Beige Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Robin Kelley, Franklin Rosemont, 2009.
Related: Freedom Dreams The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley, 2002
