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.

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.

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