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| author | Michael King |
| title | An Anticolonial Consciousness: Surrealism, Marxism, and Colonialism in Interwar France |
| abstract |
The historiography of interwar surrealism demonstrates that as part of the movement's revolt against the intellectual, cultural, and political categories that defined
Western civilization, the surrealists embraced both Marxism and anticolonialism. This study argues that the existing literature on surrealism has maintained an
interpretive divide between surrealist Marxism and anticolonialism that obscures the decisive interplay between these elements of the movement's political project during
the interwar period. As a result of this separation, scholars have failed to account properly for why the movement first turned to Marxism and they have offered an
overly simplistic understanding of surrealist anticolonialism, construing it as a simple inversion of the fallacy of French cultural superiority that proponents of
colonialism championed to legitimize the colonial system. This study brings together these two strands of the historiography to overcome the failings of each.
Relying on an examination of the political texts and images produced by the surrealists, drawing largely on the official periodicals
La Révolution surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, this study shows that the movement's anticolonialism was not an
outgrowth of its Marxism, but rather that an anticolonial impetus actually motivated surrealism's engagement with Marxist politics and the French Communist Party.
This commitment to Marxism endured even after the movement's alliance with the PCF collapsed in the early 1930s, but these changes in the movement's relationship to
Marxism generated important revisions to surrealist anticolonialism, which this study reconstructs. Thus this reappraisal of the relationship between surrealist
anticolonialism and Marxism shows that the true nature of the surrealist project and its influence on broader interwar debates about colonialism, communism, and the
role of art in society can be uncovered only when these elements of the movement's political agenda are understood in tandem.
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| school | The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University |
| degree | Ph.D. (2016) |
| advisor | Edward Baring |
| committee | Kimberly Rhodes
Allan Dawson
John Savage |
| full text | MKing.pdf |
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