« Black Flowers » : Surréalisme(s), révolte(s) et revues francophones

Abstract

In this study, I seek to understand how militant writers emerging from colonial contexts appropriated Surrealism by analyzing their critical interventions published in three journals between the 1930s and 1940s: Légitime Défense, L’Étudiant Noir, and Tropiques. In what ways, and through what processes, did these writers have to deviate from, transform, or inflect a movement so deeply rooted in metropolitan France in order to adapt it to their own poetic and political struggles? During the 1930s and 1940s, these writers and poets faced multiple forms of discrimination, revealing a persistent entanglement between racial and class hierarchies. While the central question for artists in France and elsewhere in Europe at the time revolved around the compatibility between literary modernity and political revolution, Afro-descendant writers were simultaneously compelled to respond to the challenges of identity formation and subjectivation. Within this framework, the objective is thus to understand how the search for a Black identity intersects with Surrealism, and how this intersection contributes to the emergence of a new poetic and political form of writing.