Afro-Surrealism

Afro-Surrealism or Afrosurrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that is a response to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the lived experience of people of color. First coined by Amiri Baraka, this movement focuses on the present day experience of African Americans. Much of Afro-Surrealism is based on the manifesto written by D. Scot Miller, in which he says, "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist..." Afro-Surrealism can be seen in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners of Afro-Surrealism include Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Kool Keith, Samuel R. Delany, Roman Bearden and Deana Lawson.

Influence

Afro-Surrealism came about after the initial rise in surrealism in the mid-1920s, after André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto. Similar to the mainstream version of surrealism, Afro-Surrealism was not a single movement or style. Rather, it incorporated aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude and magical realism. Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire’s discussion of the “revolutionary impetus of surrealism” in the 1940s.

Marvelous Realism, coined by the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, can be seen as a precursor to Afro-Surrealism. In his 1956 essay for Présence Africaine, he 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 dissimilar to traditional surrealism. Suzanne Césaire, a Martinique writer, similarly wrote about the surreality of living away from the Caribbean yet having ties to it.

Development

Afro-Surrealism was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1988 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. This idea that the past resurfaces to haunt the present day is a crucial to Afro-Surrealism.

Cinematographer Arthur Jafa expanded the field of Afro-Surrealism by experimenting with film. Jafa introduces the idea of "the alien familiar," in order to represent the Black experience and its innate surreal characteristics. "I want it to have something that I and my friends call 'the alien familiar.' If a work succeeds in a way or is able to conjure what a Black cinema would be or what this hypothetical manifestation of this particular tradition in the cinematic arena might be, it should be both alien because you’ve never seen anything quite like it, and at the same time, it should be familiar on some level to Black audiences." This focus on the alien aspect of the Black experience, and on Black folk culture, are what separate Afro-Surrealism from magical realism and surrealism.

A Manifesto of Afro-Surreal was written by D. Scot Miller's and was published in 2009. The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto also declares the necessity of Afro-Surrealism, especially in San Francisco, California. The manifesto lists ten tenants 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."

Themes

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Deana Lawson, Emily and Daughter, 2002

The everyday lived experience

Much of Afro-Surrealism is concerned with the everyday life because it is said that there is nothing more surreal than the Black experience. An example of this would be a photo by Deana Lawson called Emily and Daughter. According to Terri Francis, "Afrosurrealism 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 Afrosurrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky."

Haunting

Afro-Surrealism is often described as having a sense of a haunting welcoming. As Francis describes it, there is a sense of disruption from the past in an otherwise ordinary or comfortable situation. An example of Afro-Surrealism seen as haunting can be seen in Toni Morrison's Beloved, in that the dead baby comes back to haunt Sethe. The past resurfacing in the present is key aspect of Afro-Surrealism.

Present day realism

Afro-Surrealist scholar Rochelle Spencer identifies at least three different subgenres of black speculative art, and Spencer argues that Afro-Surrealism is the most present-focus, though it is not devoid of technology and may include allusions to modern technology. According Francis, the juxtaposition between the old and the present day is what makes Afro-Surrealism so unique. As Francis puts it, "Surrealism here, the Afro-surreal, like the marvelous discussed above, is actually a realism so real, so contrary to the norms of publicized blackness, that it represents a rupture, a radical break from ordinary understanding such that the old feels new—because it was never known." Although this movement is related to Afrofuturism, it is different in that instead of focusing on the future, Afro-Surrealism focuses more on the present day.