54 pages • 1 hour read
Robin KelleyFreedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 6-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Keeping It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous”
Surrealism is an artistic movement that Kelley defines as “a living, mutable, creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom” (158). While primarily an art movement, surrealism is concerned with all aspects of human life and society. In this essay, Kelley details both how Black radicalism influenced the creation of surrealism and how surrealism has influenced Black radicalism.
In the section entitled “Surrealism and Us,” Kelley describes how surrealists in Europe began to take more radical political stances beginning around 1925, inspired both by anticolonial movements in North Africa and by Black art and politics. They also looked to folk cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas to inspire their work. For example, Kelley connects the surrealist practice of automatic writing to shamanistic folk practices.
The European (mostly French) surrealists were also inspired by Black American music, especially jazz and the work of Thelonious Monk, which turned traditional rules of music on their head. The blues was also valorized as a form of poetry that articulates desire, fantasy, and freedom, values that resonated with the surrealists who were interested in sexual liberation and eroticism. The blues also articulates a critique of meaningless work and the importance of humor in the face of oppression, which inspired surrealists like André Breton.
In the section entitled “Freedom Dreams from the Jungle,” Kelley describes how Black activists internationally adopted elements of surrealism into their protest movements. Kelley analyzes in detail one of these activists, Aimé Césaire, an anticolonial writer, activist, and politician from the French territory of Martinique, a Caribbean island. While on vacation in Yugoslavia in 1935, Césaire writes his most famous poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays Natal” or “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land,” an anticolonialist, surrealist tract. He later returns to Martinique and founds the surrealist, anticolonial journal Tropiques in 1939. Tropiques brought together surrealism, Marxism, and anticolonialism. Surrealism was important to Césaire because it “helped him to summon up powerful unconscious forces” in his fight against French colonialism (169). Kelley discusses the oft-overlooked contributions of Suzanne Césaire, Aimé’s wife, who connected surrealism with imagination, freedom, and the marvelous in her writings. Kelley also analyzes the surrealist paintings of Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam as an example of the connections between these themes.
In the section “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” Kelley analyzes Aimé Césaire’s anticapitalist, anticolonialist manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism (1950). He notes that, although Marxism typically eschews non-material elements like fantasy and imagination, Césaire’s Marxism was modified by surrealism to incorporate something closer to the full scope of human experience. The other key theme in Discourse is the importance of Négritude, a term Césaire coined to refer to global Black resistance culture. Kelley advocates for contemporary Black activists to draw inspiration from Césaire’s writings and theories to imagine a different postcolonial world.
In the following section, “The Noise of Our Living: In the Wilderness of North America,” Kelley looks at the influence of surrealism on Black American writers such as Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy. Wright himself describes Native Son as a text that tries to put the reader into the mind of the main character, Bigger Thomas, rather than a naturalist or realist text. Kelley argues that Wright and other Black artists were drawn to surrealism because of their cultural affinity with “the Marvelous” (185) and imagination. Kelley supports this argument with an analysis of the poetry of Jayne Cortez, an activist, writer, and theatre director whose work emphasizes the strength and innovation of African peoples. Kelley also analyzes the work of surrealist poet Ted Joans, whose writings are both revolutionary and playful.
In the final section, “Revolution of the Mind,” Kelley advocates for Black activists to utilize the tools of surrealism to help imagine new possible worlds. He feels that surrealism can go further in sparking liberation than many ideologies, including Marxism. Surrealism, as a movement that brings together love, imagination, poetry, and revolution, has the possibility to create solidarity and challenge capitalism when deployed by activist movements.
Afterword Summary: “When History Wakes: A New Beginning”
Kelley ends the essay collection with a demonstration of how the concepts he has emphasized throughout the text might be applied in a real-world context, namely in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Towers on 9/11. He proposes that where the towers once stood should be designated “international territory” (196) put under the administration of a group of international artists who will turn the site into a park. Kelley envisions this park as a place of community, play, and freedom funded by contributions diverted from the military budgets of countries around the world. He acknowledges that this park will not be created without a struggle, but that “struggle is par for the course when our dreams go into action” (198). While this kind of imaginative exercise might seem frivolous, Kelley argues that being able to imagine possibilities is an important aspect of liberation.
Chapter 6-Afterword Analysis
The sixth essay, “Keeping It (Sur)real,” is seemingly the outlier in the collection. Unlike the other essays, it focuses primarily on a non-American activist, Aimé Césaire, and a French movement, surrealism. While the other essays do address International Aspects of Black American Radicalism, they are largely structured such that the focus moves from American figures in the movement to their connections to international resistance movements. This essay applies a different structure, describing a Parisian artistic movement, and then analyzing how Black American radicals engaged with this mode of thought. Superficially, it may seem overly abstracted from the history of the Black American radical movement that Kelley has described to this point. However, Kelley gives Césaire such primacy because his concept of Négritude has been essential to the development of a global Black consciousness. Due to Césaire and the activism of others in his milieu, such as Léopold Senghor, France was for a time a hub for prominent Black Americans seeking to escape the racism of the United States, including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Josephine Baker, the latter of whom was awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre and is interred in the French Pantheon. While Kelley details some of these close relationships between Black radicalism in the United States and France, he presumes the reader has some understanding of this context.
Far from an outlier, the sixth essay is a culmination of the three major themes of the text: Imagination in Activism, International Aspects of Black American Radicalism, and Intersectionality in Resistance Movements. Kelley opens the essay by drawing a connection between the language of Black American jazz musician Thelonious Monk and that of the French poet Compte de Lautréamont, also known as Isidore Ducasse. In so doing, he highlights how poetic language has resonance for resistance movements across space and time. In his analysis, the ability to communicate across boundaries to describe new possibilities and new worlds is what makes this poetic language so important to maintaining momentum in mass movements. Further, the surrealist movement drew heavily from cultures often marginalized in Western society, including the folk cultures of Africa and the traditions of Indigenous Americans. In this way, surrealism fundamentally incorporates what is known in contemporary times as intersectionality. Kelley mentions, for instance, that surrealist automatic writing is in some ways analogous to shamanism, a folk tradition.
Additionally, in this essay Kelley critiques the mainstream view of Césaire as a Caribbean writer mimicking a European artistic genre. He notes that in this view “surrealism is treated as ‘European thought’ and, like Marxism, is considered alien to non-European cultural traditions” (169). Instead, Kelley reframes the debate by highlighting that Césaire himself was quite open about the influence of surrealism on his work and stressing that in fact contributions from Césaire and others in the African diaspora influenced and expanded the scope of surrealism. This is an example of Kelley’s dialectic mode of analysis, where, in his view, European and non-European cultural traditions are synthesized through surrealism.
The short Afterword is an exercise in what is known as praxis. Praxis is the implementation of theory in the real world. Having laid out his view of the history and future of Black radical politics, Kelley then models one example of how his intersectional, imaginative Black radicalism might work in practice. While the outcome of this exercise is utopic and may seem unfeasible, Kelley argues that dreaming on a large scale is necessary to animate contemporary movements.
