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The Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile, 1973-1980
Abstract
In late 1972, a small circle of writers, artists, and students in Western Europe from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Algeria launched the Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile. The surrealist group was based in Paris, and it was greatly influenced by the radical student and worker uprisings of 1968-70 in France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. They regarded themselves as inheritors of the more dissident Freudo-Marxist aspects of the surrealist project begun by poets Andr? Breton and Louis Aragon at the end of the First World War, but their contemporary approach was fueled by Situationist and Frankfurt School critiques of contemporary capitalist society, as well as various experiments in anarchism and post-Left autonomist Marxism. Whereas the first-generation surrealists of the 1920s attacked the liberal-bourgeois power structure in Europe, the Arab surrealists of the 1970s targeted the Middle East: "Our surrealism destroys that which they call 'the Arab fatherland.' We explode the mosques and the streets with the scandal of sex returning to its body, bursting into flames at each encounter. We liberate language from the prisons and stock markets of capitalist confusion," their founding manifesto proclaimed. Toward that end, the group produced what they called "agitational propaganda": tracts, pamphlets, and publications (in Arabic and French) that savaged nationalism, Islam, militarism, capitalism, and the State. One of their more notorious periodicals was *Al Raghba al-ibbhiyya* (1973-84), a self-proclaimed "non-Israeli anti-Arab publication" bristling with confrontational surrealist ideas and imagery that was quickly outlawed as blasphemous, pornographic, and politically subversive by governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to surrealist illustrations, poems, letters, Arabic translations of older European-language Romantic and surrealist texts, and new polemics on current events, publications like *Al Raghba al-ibihiyya* reflected the Arab surrealists' intense interest in anti-authoritarian culture and politics in a Middle Eastern context. My paper examines a small but typical sample of images and texts from the Arab surrealists, ranging from the first issue of *Al Raghba al-ib-hiyya* in 1973 and continuing up to their September 1980 pamphlet denouncing the Iran-Iraq War. Of particular interest is how and why the group promoted a revolutionary dialectical integration of "art" and "politics" (in their words, "an osmotic continuity in the unique trajectory of an individual praxis of Inspired Revolution") as a means for undermining the oppressive and repressive regimes throughout the Middle East by liberating imagination, creativity, and expression from the everyday miseries of a fragmented, alienated life.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries