Black, Brown, & Beige

Surrealism as a movement has always resisted the efforts of critics to confine it to any static definition—surrealists themselves have always preferred to speak of it in terms of dynamics, dialectics, goals, and struggles. Accordingly, surrealist groups have always encouraged and exemplified the widest diversity—from its start the movement was emphatically opposed to racism and colonialism, and it embraced thinkers from every race and nation.

Yet in the vast critical literature on surrealism, all but a few black poets have been invisible. Academic histories and anthologies typically, but very wrongly, persist in conveying surrealism as an all-white movement, like other "artistic schools" of European origin. In glaring contrast, the many publications of the international surrealist movement have regularly featured texts and reproductions of works by comrades from Martinique, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, South America, the United States, and other lands. Some of these publications are readily available to researchers; others are not, and a few fall outside academia's narrow definition of surrealism.

This collection is the first to document the extensive participation of people of African descent in the international surrealist movement over the past seventy-five years. Editors Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley aim to introduce readers to the black, brown, and beige surrealists of the world—to provide sketches of their overlooked lives and deeds as well as their important place in history, especially the history of surrealism.

Franklin Rosemont, editor of the Surrealist Revolution Series published by the University of Texas Press, was welcomed into the surrealist group in Paris in 1966 by renowned surrealist André Breton. Rosemont has contributed to many international surrealist exhibitions and journals, among them Analogon in Prague and L'Archibras in Paris. Among his books are Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism, Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous, An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers, and Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants.

Robin D. G. Kelley, a distinguished scholar of African American history, is Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis); and, most recently, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.