Surrealism, Politics and Culture

[Dave Monroe]

Spiteri, Raymond and Donald LaCoss, eds.
   Surrealism, Politics and Culture.
   Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.

"Drawing on literary, art historical and historical
studies, this essay collection explores the complex
encounter between culture and politics within
Surrealism. The Surrealist movement was one of the
first cultural movements to question explicitly the
relation between culture and politics, and its attempt
to fuse social and cultural revolution has been a
critical factor in shaping our sense of modernity; yet
few books have been published that directly address
this aspect of the movement. Although the historical
importance of Surrealism is beyond doubt, politics
plays an ambiguous role in the movement: it
indisputably pervades the work, informing its
endeavours, yet it seems to evade direct articulation.

"This anthology addresses not only the contested
ground between culture and politics within surrealism
itself, and within the subsequent historical accounts
of the movement, but also the broader implications of
this encounter on our own sense of modernity. Its goal
is to delineate the role of radical politics in
shaping the historical trajectory of Surrealism by
drawing on the new perspectives provided by the latest
considerations of social history, gender studies and
postcolonial or race studies--approaches further
modulated by the theoretical, methodological and
disciplinary focuses of each contributor. This
approach reveals new dimensions in the work of central
figures like André Breton, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí
and Hans Bellmer, the Surrealists' involvement in the
politics of race and anti-colonialism, their relation
to communism and anarchism, and the role of
exhibitions as a site of political struggle. The
volume illuminates how Surrealism played a contentious
yet integral role to the development of contemporary
French thought, and how it forms the background to
current intellectual debates through its contribution
to recent French theory."

https://www.ashgate.com/shopping/title.asp?key1=&key2=&orig=results&isbn=0%207546%200989%208

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