Towards an anti-colonial aesthetic politics: Surrealist praxis and epistemic refusal

Abstract This paper considers what anti-colonial surrealist praxis can provide those of us interested in the nexus of aesthetics and world politics. Thinking beyond the commonly held notion of surrealism as a European cultural movement, I engage with the writings of 20th-century anti-colonial surrealists, namely, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, and René Ménil. In doing so, I argue that anti-colonial surrealism is beyond a movement, a selection of methods, a genre or a set of ideas. Instead, I aim to position anti-colonial surrealist praxis as an epistemology that allows us to move beyond the limitations of representation, both by surfacing historical intimacies (rather than gaps) between content and form, while also questioning the demarcation between art and politics. I illustrate my argument’s resonance in the contemporary political moment through an engagement with aesthetic interventions produced by Sai, an artist exiled from contemporary Myanmar. Sai’s absurdist creative interventions and material drawn from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations allow me to demonstrate the political possibilities of an ‘anti-colonial surrealist praxis’ approach, in its conception of aesthetics as co-constitutive, rather than only representative, of the political.