Black intellectuals embraced surrealism as a return to African culture rather than European innovation

Evidence

The Afro-Chinese Cuban painter Wifredo Lam says he was drawn to surrealism because he already knew the power of the unconscious having grown up in the Africanized spirit world of Santeria. Aimé Césaire insists that surrealism merely brought him back to African culture. In a 1967 interview he explained, “Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation.” Surrealism also helped him to summon up powerful unconscious forces: “This, for me, was a call to Africa. I said to myself: it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 42

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated tracing of the Black radical tradition’s intellectual origins; surrealism as a conduit from African metaphysics to Black politics parallels the chapter’s theorized root in mind-structure revolt.