Interdisciplinary Arts 0232 - Surreal & Poetry of Afri Diasp

In his seminal manifesto, French poet Andre Breton considered surrealism as much political orientation as aesthetic. It was at the very least a response to what was, in Breton's view, an increasingly oppressive intellectual and social milieu. Surrealism, Breton tells us, "leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life." Breton's ideas were especially attractive to Martiniquan poet and political figure Aime Cesaire. For Cesaire, surrealism seemed a logical model for decolonizing land as well as mind, for what Cesaire termed "a refusal of the shadow." In this course, we examine the relationships between surrealism and Cesaire's notion of negritude, and how these two modes impacted successive generations of poets of the African diaspora. We'll frame our discussion within the larger context of Black cultural responses to slavery, colonization, and the legacies of each. Poets under consideration include Cesaire, Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, Terrance Hayes, Thylias Moss, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and the rappers Kool Keith and MF Doom.