Afro-surrealism is dead (and it’s about damn time)

May 20, 2024 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Afrosurreal Manifesto, published in San Francisco Bay Guardian. Before writing the manifesto, I checked Amiri Baraka and Google to see if the word was used as an artistic frame. There was only one entry. Keziah Jones, in his album Black Orpheus (2003) had a song called Afrosurrealismfortheladies. Other than that, the only other entries related to Baraka’s essays on Henry Dumas from the early 1970s. After meeting Baraka in the late 1990s, I interviewed him a few times and was given permission to expand the term beyond the pantheon he created. I incorporated other movements – such as Négritude and NeoHooDoo – into the term. I didn’t coin the term “Afro-Surrealism”; I simply went straight to the source and root word “Afrosurreal” and turned it into an artistic framework to shine a light on overlooked artists, writers and thinkers. Personalities who shaped an aesthetic that still had no name.

I really didn’t think my manifesto would survive the year, and although I received some praise for it locally – including talk of an exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), which never materialized – I had accepted it in 2010 it had died. There were no Google entries for this term other than my now long-defunct blog Afrosurreal Generation, where I wanted to track what the manifesto created in the zeitgeist – which was nothing at the time.

I outlined the rapid evolution of the manifesto and its critics from 2009 to 2016 in my essay “Afrosurreal: The Marvelous and The Invisible 2016,” when I became a columnist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. In 2016, I was pretty sure that the Afrosurreal Arts movement had made an impact, but I also experienced academics and artists trying to steal my work and redefine its history to fit their personal and professional goals . I tried to fight these deletions for years, but there were too many, too many times. Correcting them would have been a full-time job. I remember thinking about this sometime in 2018 – which Afropunk called “The Year of Afro-Surrealism,” and that Guardian ran an article on Afro-Surrealism that didn’t mention me but stole most of the references from my SFMoMA writings – that people were creating works in a genre that I had created but from which I had been excluded so that erasure could take place . No one in the industry ever asked for me, and I was excluded from the movement that created my manifesto. Ironically, Afro-Surrealism has been treated as a subgenre of Surrealism, even though no art critic of integrity would say that Surrealism is a subgenre of Realism or that the author of the manifesto of an art movement was not the founder of that movement.

Even if no one initially claimed it, films like Sorry to bother you (2018) and Exit (2017) and television shows like Atlanta (2016–22) has been accepted into the pantheon of Afro-Surrealism. But it wasn’t until February 2023, when Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions recognized me and my work in a TikTok post, that most of the deletion subsided a bit. As honored as I was by this post, they also added the hashtag #BHM2023, short for Black History Month 2023, suggesting that my manifesto came from a distant past that probably still exists today.

In 2024, I can google “Afrosurrealism” and find thousands of quotes and references ranging from academic papers to museums and art galleries to plays, music, books, films and television shows. What I also find is that the eradication of its origins is almost complete. The frequency of my name and my manifesto not being mentioned is far greater than the instances where this is the case, and the original intent and references of the document have been completely obscured, primarily so that others can lay claim to something that they really have no entitlement, and can give it away to white-run, black-only capitalist enterprises, rather than the black-led multiracial coalitions that the manifesto seeks to inspire.

This is not to say that some institutions, artists and young people, particularly academics in Europe and the Antilles, have not contacted me, quoted me properly, or are trying to expand on or work from the Afrosurreal Manifesto. Except they are drowned out by malicious actors and deletion-oriented schemers.

I find this situation analogous to De La Soul’s debut album, Three feet high and rising. They too changed the parameters of a genre through hybridization and expansion of vocabulary, only to be discredited and erased as innovators. So much so that they titled their second album: De La Soul is dead.

Afro-surrealism may not be dead, but in its current perverse form it is definitely dead for me.