Le Je de l'autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean

Abstract

LE SURREALISME S’EST EVANOUI? C’est qu’il n’est plus ici ou la: il est partout. C’est un fantome, une brillante hantise. A son tour, metamorphose meritee, il est devenu surreel.”2 Maurice Blanchot’s comment on the global dissemination of surrealism in La Part du feu (1949) highlights the often-neglected fact that while Surrealism took shape in Europe in the aftermath of World War I, its impact was also deeply felt in non-European countries. It is arguably in the Caribbean and South America that Surrealism produced a long and sustained dialogue on the question of the relationship between Europe and its colonial others. In the Caribbean in particular, this relationship goes back to 1932 and the journal Legitime Defense started by Rene Menil and Jules Monnerot. Later a unique series of encounters take place in the 1940s that constitute a much neglected but crucial moment in the global spread of Surrealist practices. While the impact of the Surrealist intellectuals’ exile in the U.S. is well documented, one would be hard put to find, even in French, a thoroughgoing examination of this period of interaction between a French literary avantgarde and Caribbean writers. Annie Cohen-Solal’s Un jour ils auront des peintres, Dickran Tashjian’s A Boatload of Madmen, Martica Sawin’s Surrealism in Exile, Jeffrey Mehlman’s Emigre New York or most recently Emmanuelle Loyer’s Paris a New York concentrate on the displacement of intellectual life from Paris to New York and the consequent creation of an American avant-garde.3 When the Surrealists’ travel through the Caribbean is mentioned, the tendency is to concentrate exclusively on Andre Breton and generally ignore the passage of Surrealist dissidents such as Pierre Mabille, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Metraux, who inaugurated a form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a welcome combination of literature and ethnography. For instance, Milan Kundera’s 1991 essay on Surrealism in the Caribbean, “The Umbrella, the Night World and the Lonely Moon,” traces a simple tra-