Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism

Abstract

Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism Martine Antle (bio) Despite the numerous exchanges and multiple echoes between dada, surrealism and other cultures, European surrealism rarely took hold abroad, whether in the diasporas or in the United States. A fundamental question posed in 1997 by Henri Béhar is still relevant today: did surrealism support non-European cultures or was it simply inspired by them in a universal, non-culturally specific way?1 A first approach to answering this question consists in revisiting the political views held by André Breton and other members of the surrealist group, including those who, like Breton, were first involved with dada. There is no doubt that Breton and other surrealists consistently spoke out against colonization and oppression. Even though it was absent from the first two “Manifestoes of Surrealism,” criticism of colonialism truly marked the history of the movement. The surrealists took strong positions against colonial domination, particularly by France, with regard to a variety of former colonies that gained independence over the course of the twentieth century, including Indochina, Algeria, Haiti and Martinique, and also Cuba. But what happened when surrealism found itself confronted with other cultures? Did surrealism truly engage with those cultures? What did it make of the range of cultural particularities and political realities the surrealists encountered in their travels? When compared with recent studies on post-colonialism, surrealism’s ideological position loses moral power because it remained essentially self-involved and disengaged with the specific struggles and needs of the people they had hoped to inspire. The greatest impact their interactions with distant cultures had was on themselves; what they sought most was confirmation of their own ideas and aesthetic ideals, which they often found more readily abroad than at home. For despite their faith in their ideology of liberation and their immense and openhearted fascination with other cultures, the surrealists often saw those cultures as exotic objects rather than collectives of real human beings with whom they might productively enter into true dialogue. For example, Mexico struck Breton as magical and a place of true revelation because it appeared to him as an idyllic version of a place in the world that he had previously only imagined. Mexico confirmed Breton’s own vision of surreality. It was in pursuit of this vision that he had traveled [End Page 116] there. Unfortunately the surrealists rarely heard the writings and sentiments coming from the cultures they admired fully, except insofar as those writings and sentiments confirmed their own ideas. In terms of surrealist production, the corpus of texts dedicated to territories outside of Europe remains relatively meager. Breton’s journeys to Prague, Haiti, or Mexico were motivated primarily by political exile, meetings, conferences, or exhibitions, which he attended with missionary zeal and the intention of bringing the surrealist world to the uninitiated. Another case in point— Antonin Artaud’s initiatory voyage to Mexico was planned as a voyage of spiritual discovery for himself and his search for a new “truth” to be used for the benefit of his own psychic growth and then brought back to France for the purpose of transforming his own culture rather than for the purpose of staying and engaging more fully with Mexican culture, the way fellow surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo did.2 These two friends developed their own strain of surrealism while living in Mexico and engaged fully with a community that was inclusive of Mexican artists and writers in addition to their own ex-patriot circle of friends. Their work flourished well beyond the fleeting influence that Breton exercised around the time of the international exhibition of surrealism in Mexico City in 1940. Where surrealism had a definite impact was on poetry and art produced by writers and artists in other countries, as examples of cross-fertilization and cultural exchange confirm. But these exchanges were predominantly artistic and not political and did not find their way into the movement’s representative political texts. As a result, the internationalization of the movement and its aftermath abroad raises once again the question of “importation” of a European movement into a foreign land. And we also have to take into account the obvious linguistic...