The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to invite you to the virtual book launch of The World Arts of Surrealism: Networks and Perspectives from the Global South. The author, Andrea Gremels, will be in discussion with Professor Patricia Allmer (University of Edinburgh), and this will be followed by a Q&A.

Between André Breton’s call to dissolve the categories of dream and reality, and the Martinican poet Suzanne Césaire’s anti-colonial claim to “finally transcend the antinomies white-black, European-African, civilized-wild,” surrealism has experienced many anticipations, inspirations, and transformations from the Global South.

Through a selection of surrealist positions from literature, film, photography, and visual art, World Arts of Surrealism shows how authors and writers such as Antonin Artaud, Wifredo Lam, Joyce Mansour, and Octavio Paz create poetic ethnographies, syncretic cosmovisions, or anti-colonial protests by re-envisioning and transforming surrealist ideas of the marvelous, the sacred, or the uncanny.

Examining the networks of surrealism in and across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the first half of the 20th century Andrea Gremels argues against Eurocentric concepts of world literature and global art history. She develops an anticentric understanding of surrealist world arts that particularly takes into account postcolonial and transcultural perspectives.

Andrea Gremels is a researcher and lecturer of Francophone, Spanish, and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. She has published widely on Caribbean and Latin American literature, film, and other media, transcultural studies, postcolonial theory, and international surrealism. She is Executive Board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, member of the advisory board of the Association Atelier André Breton, and a former Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Latin American Institute of Freie Universität Berlin.

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh, and is an internationally leading expert on women artists and Surrealism. She has curated major exhibitions including Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (2009) and 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-garde (2018). She regularly contributes invited essays and articles to exhibitions, books, and magazines. Her latest monograph is The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism after the Second World War (Manchester UP, 2022). https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/patricia-allmer

To order The World Arts of Surrealism: Networks and Perspectives from the Global South visit here.

For a 35 % discount, contact the author at a.gremels@em.uni-frankfurt.de

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

We look forward to seeing you on Sunday October 9, 6pm (CET). Please check your own timezone.