Surrealism and the Francophone Caribbean
Professor : J.M.Dash
Fall 2007 - Tuesday 6.20
Outline
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 between French Surrealists fleeing a war-torn Europe during World War II and Caribbean writers in Martinique and Haiti. This course will look both at the initial impact of Surrealist ideas on Caribbean writers in the 1930s and the encounters that took place in the Caribbean during and after World war II between Surrealist artists escaping Europe and a post–Negritude generation of writers in the French Caribbean colonies and Haiti. These encounters between the traveling Surrealists and Caribbean writers such as the Tropiques group, Magloire St Aude, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Rene Depestre and Edouard Glissant mark the emergence of a new arguably postcolonial moment in French Caribbean writing.
André Breton, Martinique charmeuse de serpents
Aime Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
Magloire St Aude, Ombres et Reflets, Veillée
Edouard Glissant, Soleil de la conscience
Jaques Stephen Alexis, Espace d'un cillement
René Depestre, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves .
A course packet with articles from Etienne Léro, Tropiques , Leiris, Ménil and Glissant.