Introduction: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism

Martine Antle, Katharine Conley

South Central Review, Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 1-7 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scr.2015.0002

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/578119

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Introduction / Antle and Conley 1

Introduction: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism

Martine Antle, University of Sydney and Katharine Conley,
College of William & Mary

Starting in 1925 with the pamphlet circulated in support of the rebels

of the Rif Valley fighting in Morocco for independence from France, the
surrealists actively adopted an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist stance.
Led by André Breton, they followed up this pamphlet with a small ex-
hibition in 1931, “The Truth about the Colonies,” along with another
pamphlet, “First Report on the Colonial Exhibition,” intended to refute
the political assumptions of the major “Colonial Exhibition” showing in
Paris at the time. While their political energies for the rest of the 1930s
became concentrated on anti-fascism followed by self-exile or active
resistance during World War Two, by the end of the war in 1946 they
published a new anti-colonialist pamphlet with the title, “Liberty is a
Vietnamese noun.” By 1950, in a talk given to a group of graduating
ethnographers, the occasional surrealist Michel Leiris called on these
young representatives of the state to defend the colonized people they
would likely be studying against the force of the French Empire they
purportedly would be representing. He told them: “ethnography appears
to be closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers desire it
to be so, or not. For the most part, it is in colonial or semi-colonial ter-
ritories dependent upon their country of origin that they work.” Later on,
he adds, “it is certain that we cannot neglect the fact that these societies
. . . have been subjugated to colonial regimes and that they have, as a
result, . . . undergone certain social disruptions. . . . . We cannot, there-
fore, on a human level, hold ourselves apart from the colonial adminis-
tration.”1 Leiris concludes by encouraging the young ethnographers to
practice an ethnography “detatched from a colonialist mindset” in order
to prepare the way for emancipation and to accept the inevitability of
the “essentially temporary” state of colonialism and thus to work on the
side of colonialism towards its undoing.2
Fourteen years later in 1960, Breton, Leiris, and other surrealists
signed the “Manifesto of the 121” in support of the people of Algeria
who had taken up arms against the French government in their desire to
free themselves from colonization. While these political positions were
undoubtedly sincere and even inspiring to those outside of France such

© South Central Review 32.1 (Spring 2015): 1–7.

2 South Central Review

as Aimé Césaire in Martinique and Rémy Bélance in Haïti, with whom

Breton met in the 1940s, in many ways they were contradicted by of the
surrealists’ enthusiasm for ceremonial objects that French colonialism and
a new market for non-Western objects in the Americas made available
to them, which they collected and admired as art from a perspective that
could be understood today as intellectually colonializing.
Even if surrealism did not situate colonialism at the center of its as-
sertions in the first two “Manifestoes of Surrealism,” the numerous pam-
phlets they circulated throughout most of the twentieth century provide
the best testimony of their anti-colonial mindset and remain today the
most enduring testimony of this anti-colonialist mindset. Overall, the
surrealists remained caught between their Marxist affiliations and the
construction of a mythic Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania, and the Ameri-
cas. To some extent, they were more concerned with the exploration of
exoticism than in actual research on the specificity of various colonial
contexts. For despite their attraction to non-European cultures and their
numerous journeys to Mexico, Egypt, Martinique, and Vietnam, for the
surrealists, the appeal of far-off lands pertains more to myth than to a
true knowledge of unfamiliar cultures founded upon a dialogue. Recent
research on surrealism shows that the most fertile exchanges and en-
counters between European surrealists and fellow artists abroad took
place not in France at the movement’s geographic center, but at its edges.
Surrealists other than Breton, such as Leonora Carrington, succeeded
in establishing real interaction with non-European cultures. Unlike
Breton, whose fabled trip to Mexico in 1938 resulted principally in his
discovering confirmation of his own artistic principles, Carrington, who
settled in Mexico City after World War Two, traveled extensively in her
adopted country. For example, her trip to the Chiapas region deepened
her knowledge of Mayan culture in a way that allowed her to absorb
Mayan cosmogony and incorporate it into her work. This research led
to the publication of El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, interpretacion de
Leonora Carrington (The Magical World of the Mayans, interpretation
by Leonora Carrington) as well as her magisterial painting by the same
name, created for the Museum of Ethnography in Mexico City. It is in fact
her paintings more than her writings on Mayan culture that most success-
fully convey her appreciation and interpolation of what she learned on
her research trips. Other surrealists like Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon,
and Remedios Varo likewise explored the Pacific Northwest Coast of
the United States and remote areas of Mexico, finding deep resonances
there with their own philosophical and aesthetic ideals.
Introduction / Antle and Conley 3

Aimé Césaire was undoubtedly the most successful fellow traveler to

the surrealist movement in bringing together the methodology of surrealist
poetry with his profound anti-colonial political commitment in his Cahier
d’un retour au pays natal. Césaire’s masterpiece constitutes the most
fully realized intersection between poetry and anti-colonial discourse of
his time. This complex symbiosis would also prompt exchanges between
Césaire and his contemporaries, such as the Guyanese poet, Léon Damas,
and the Haitian poet and activist, René Depestre, who was exiled in Cuba
and who founded the Casa de las Américas publishing firm.
This volume of the South Central Review examines the contradictory
relationship the surrealists had with colonialism, from an understanding
of the anachronism of condemning them for their inability to see the
link between their appetite for the objects they collected from parts of
the world that had been colonized that were available to them because
of colonization and their own anti-colonialist stance, to an appreciation
of how their anti-establishment poetry, art, and politics inspired young
revolutionaries outside of Europe, to the relationship to non-Western
people they developed themselves as they crossed the Americas in their
effort to escape World War Two and discovered new worlds and cultures.
Within the framework of this volume dedicated to the responses to
colonialism provoked by dada and surrealism in Europe and abroad and
the numerous instances of cross-fertilization that occurred, we must
also take into account diasporic artists and writers. To what extent did
the surrealists ponder the question of colonialism and the question of
the colonial subject? And, finally, how did they respond to the “call of
diversity” which, according to Edouard Glissant, corresponds to the first
step in reflecting upon otherness in the West? The internationalization
of the surrealist movement and its anticolonial ambitions raise wider
considerations concerning the transculturation of a European movement
occurring on foreign land, and the particularities of a movement that de-
veloped without well-established communities abroad and with relatively
little institutional support. However, as we will present here, surrealism
was able to promote a fundamental space of cross-cultural mediation that
was crucial to the formation of twentieth-century modernity and that has
opened the path to modern criticism for all those directly or indirectly
committed to the movement. The examination of the points of tension,
contradiction, and exchange between European surrealism and colonial-
ism challenges us today to re-examine previously accepted terminology
used to talk about alterity, the “Other” and the “primitive.” It is even more
important to acknowledge the newly created spaces of cross-cultural
mediation throughout the avant-garde. The surrealists clearly traced an
4 South Central Review

unprecedented cartography of artistic exchanges on a global level, thus

making the surrealists the precursors of intercultural exchanges that
appear in contemporary art today. Our retrospective view of surrealism
invites us to think beyond “oppositions” or “conflicts” between cultures
and to consider the possibility of cross-fertilization and the crossing or
transfers of cultures. From this perspective, the surrealists were the first
to initiate and problematize a dialogue on the intercultural (“between
cultures”) and transcultural (“across cultures”) dimensions of art.
The articles selected for this discussion place dada and surrealism
face to face with the colonial question, in Europe, the Americas, and
in the former colonies. They strategically point out and interrogate the
complexities and contradictions that such a sensitive topic entails, since
re-examining surrealism, in particular, in this context implies cross-
examining the ideologies of the intellectuals on the left who created
the dada and surrealist movements in Paris during the interwar period.
While our goal is not to stage a debate about the revolutionary ideals of
the surrealists, we cannot ignore the difficulty certain artists and writers
had in translating their anti-colonialist position fully into their textual,
visual, or political interactions with the arts, cultural struggles, and indi-
viduals from the territories colonized by European and North American
nations and national policies, especially given the fact that several artists
did indeed articulate a direct and open critique of colonialism, as in the
case of Hannah Höch.
In light of current post-colonial criticism, approaching dada, surreal-
ism, and the colonial question today involves taking a multi-disciplinary
perspective and adopting a cultural studies approach. It also entails
examining new diasporas that resulted from colonial explorations in
Africa and the Caribbean. From this cross-cultural standpoint, we chose
to address the following questions that are inherent to the surrealist map
of the world and their focus on former colonial territories: interpret-
ing the conflicting practices of collecting; aesthetics as it relates to the
colonial critique; the place of archival documents in highlighting what
could be called colonial anxiety, deriving from the mid-century period
during which many colonies slowly achieved independence from their
former colonizers; the politics of ethnographic surrealism; and finally, the
extent to which surrealism might have proved to be a contributing factor
in political and artistic thought and action in the post-colonial world.
Katharine Conley’s opening article, “Value and Hidden Cost in André
Breton’s Surrealist Collection,” demonstrates that the collection practices
of surrealists are situated at the heart of the tension inherent to the debate
on surrealism and its colonial activism. No other aspect of surrealism can
Introduction / Antle and Conley 5

better problematize the conflicting perspectives that surrealists might have

had when it came to collecting “primitive” art from various areas of the
world dominated by Western nations, particularly in the Pacific Islands,
the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the American Indian reservations of the
United States. These collection practices as presented by Conley oppose
the economic realities of collecting to the moral and ethical implications
that such practices involve. How could Breton reconcile his collection
with his consistent rejection of active participation in the bourgeois
economy? This is an open debate and haunting question.
On the other hand, Hannah Höch’s dada-influenced photo-montages,
the topic of the second contribution of the volume by Merrill Cole,
construct a sharper colonial critique situated in contrast with Breton’s
ambiguities. Cole’s analysis, “Uncapture this Image,” focuses on Höch
and David Wojnarowicz. In her Aus einem Ethnographischen Museum
series, Höch clearly injects a social commentary of Weimar Germany.
She is a pioneer with her mode of engagement and her representations of
ethnographic of colonial and racial tropes. She deserves our full attention
in the debate of colonialism versus dada and surrealism, because of the
explicit critique of colonialism that she stages in her photomontages.
According to Cole, Hannah Höch engages the viewer with a systematic
and ongoing critique “of an appropriative Western gaze that reduces
bodies, foreign and domestic, to commodities.”
Phyllis Taoua’s essay, “The Effects of Censorship on the Emergence
of Anti-Colonial Protest in France,” brings new perspectives to the co-
lonial question in surrealism by examining the politics of censorship at
the time of the advent of anti-colonial protests in France, particularly
with regard to the former French colony of French Equatorial Africa and
the French overseas department of Martinique. Taoua inserts valuable
archival documents into the discussion, and in particular material from
the French National Archives in Paris that contain evidence of official
censorship of anti-colonial activities during the interwar period. Taoua’s
original close reading of this material unravels and exposes the colonial
anxiety that pervaded surrealism in the broader context of French society
at that time.
With her article entitled “Myth, History and Repetition: André Breton
and Vodou in Haiti,” Terri Geis brings Haiti into the conversation centered
on surrealism and colonialism and places Vodou history and culture on the
surrealist map to frame it within the surrealist’s conception of myth and
utopia. The question under scrutiny here is the extent to which Breton’s
attraction to Vodou rituals and interest in Hector Hyppolite was solely
a manifestation of his eclectic practice of borrowings and attraction to
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the exotic or whether Hyppolite had a more lasting impact on Breton

and surrealism. Geis’s analysis of the exhibition “Surrealism in 1947”
held in Paris at the Galerie Maeght shows how Vodou rituals found their
way into the Parisian artistic scene and served as a model of liberation in
post-war France from pre-war notions of nationalism tied to colonialism.
Claudia Mesh’s contribution, “Shadows of the Colonial: David Hare,
empathetic perception, and ethnographic Surrealism in the 1940s,” re-
visits and questions the politics and aesthetics of ethnographic surreal-
ism by introducing the United States as existing in a colonial relation to
indigenous populations. She juxtaposes and compares the practices of
ethnographic surrealism to the often-overlooked photographic portfolio
by the American surrealist artist David Hare, Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico As They Are Today, published in New York in 1941. She proposes
that Aby Warburg among other art historians may indeed open up new
theoretical ground for mapping the complex and conflicting relation
between the Western self and the indigenous artist in surrealism, arguing
that Hare sought a more interactive approach to his perspective on the
Native cultures he photographed and with which he came in contact than
previous photographers and than the European surrealists.
With his “‘La Poesía Sorprendida,’ or the Surrealist Poetic Imagination
Against Neocolonial Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, 1943-
1947,” Anthony Dawahare opens challenging new perspectives that take
us in new directions in our re-evaluation of surrealism and colonialism.
He takes a clear stand on the role of surrealism in foreign lands as hav-
ing a liberatory impulse and argues in particular that surrealism played
a determining role through the journal La Poésia Sorprendida in 1940
within the Dominican Republic. Dawahare’s reading of La Poesía Sor-
prendida opens a crucial chapter in the history of international surrealism
and the history of colonialism, through his study of the journal as taking
inspiration from surrealism in playing a role in resisting the dictatorial
rule of Rafael Trujillo, whose repressive dominance of the population
emulated the legacy of the nation’s history as a Spanish colony starting
in the late fifteenth-century and later as a territory occupied by the United
States in the twentieth century.
Critics today must still contend with the legacy of the colonial era,
which only ended officially after World War Two as successive waves of
struggles for independence resulted in the creation of new nations. We
seek to avoid over-generalizing to the point where the subjectivity of the
individuals at stake gets lost in a quest for an over-arching, global theory
of humanity. the surrealists were so swept up in such a quest that they
tended to overloook local subjectivities and their inclination to see others
Introduction / Antle and Conley 7

through a distinctly european gaze. In their ideal vision of themselves,

the surrealists sought to undo binaries, starting with the transformation
of dream and reality into surreality in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism”
from 1924.3 Breton continued with this theme in the “Second Manifesto”
from 1930 with his claim that surrealism sought to undo the old “an-
tinomies” which he later identified as the goal of achieving a “sublime
point.”4 This aim to undo old binaries and by association old hierarchies
was one of the factors that attracted women to the movement just as the
surrealists’ interest in the politics of liberation and their desire to think
globally and welcome citizens of the world into the surrealist fold, as
evidenced by their map from 1929 and in their welcome of poets and
artists from Martinique, Haïti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the
creators of objects from the Pacific Islands, the American Plains, and the
Pacific Northwest Coast, similarly attracted poets and artists from those
parts of the world that were seeking independence from colonial rule,
including French colonial territories and American Indian reservations.
This inclusive approach to texts published outside of the mainstream in
Europe and the United States and their authors sheds new light on the
impact of surrealism in former colonies, attained through wars of con-
quest by Europeans and North Americans. The issue hopefully invites
new generations of scholars to continue to engage in this cross-cultural
debate—scholars steeped in the postcolonial world of the twenty-first
century.

Notes
1. Our translation. Michel Leiris, “L’ethnographe devant le colonialism,” Cinq études
d’ethnologie (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1988), 85, 88.
2. Ibid., 111, 110, 111.
3. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14.
4. Ibid. 123; André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1987).