This paperÌýexploresÌý³Ù³ó±ðÌýsignificant interventionsÌýmadeÌýby African American artists, writers,Ìýand activistsÌýintoÌýSurrealism’s postwar currencyÌýin the US. Foremost among themÌýwasÌýTed Joans,Ìýwho collaborated with the Parisian circle ofÌýSurrealists during the 1960s,Ìýand later joined the Chicago group of Surrealists.ÌýJoans is better known as a writer from ³Ù³ó±ðÌýBeat generation, but thisÌýpaperÌýexploresÌýhis visual practice as a space through which he worked out multiple, and often competingÌýallegiances toÌýSurrealism, ³Ù³ó±ðÌýBeats,ÌýandÌýthe Black Arts Movement.ÌýItÌýfocussesÌýon his collage novel The Hipsters in particularÌýwhichÌýdraws on the collage practice of Max Ernst to depict a satirical, pseudo-ethnographic account of the everyday life of beatniks and hipsters in Greenwich village, New York, in the early 1960s. I argue that in Joans’ collage work, surrealismÌýitself might function, and indeed be regenerated, as an ethnographic objectÌýitself, out of place and out of time in postwarÌýNorth America.Ìý
Dr Joanna Pawlik is lecturer in the department of Art History at the University of Sussex (2014-).ÌýFrom 2008 to 2011 she taught in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, collaborating with the AHRC Centre for the 91ÖÆƬ³§ of Surrealism and its Legacies and contributing to its three-year project Surrealism and Queer Sexualities in particular. She received a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2011Ìýand the resulting monograph,ÌýRemadeÌýin America: Surrealist Art, Activism and Politics 1940-1978Ìýwill be published by University of California Press inÌýSpring 2021. She received a Leverhulme Research FellowshipÌýin 2020/21Ìýfor her new project ‘Figuring fascism in American art, 1945–1980’. She has published widely on surrealism,ÌýpostwarÌýAmerican art and visual culture, transnationalism, regionalism, and little magazines.ÌýÌý
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld)Ìý
