Surrealists allied with anticolonial movements and condemned Western civilization outright

Evidence

Although the surrealist movement was led by European writers and artists such as André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Benjamin Péret, one could see in their pronouncements why surrealism would attract the radical Black petit bourgeoisie. Surrealists explicitly called for the overthrow of bourgeois culture, identified with anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia, and turned to non-European cultures as a source of ideas and inspiration in their critique of Western civilization. In 1925 the Paris surrealist group asserted in no uncertain terms, “We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilisation whose vermin you defend even in the Orient.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 40

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of Black radical tradition origins — the anticolonial politics that attracted the radical Black petit bourgeoisie toward surrealism as a precursor to the tradition’s crystallization in the 1930s.