[Minorcompositions] Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism

[Minor Compositions]

*Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism 
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1414296529625227>*
September 1st @ 7PM UK Time, online 
<https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/94906243269>

Event ThumbnailThis event brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy 
to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a 
focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as 
an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished 
by World War II or the death of André Breton, surrealism instead 
persisted – and continues – as a living, transnational community 
committed to creative and social transformation. Drawing on their 
extensive research, which resulted in two special issue of the /Journal 
of Avant-Garde Studies/,  Susik and Löwy will discuss how surrealism’s 
anti-authoritarian investments have manifested across different 
geographies and political contexts, from postwar Europe to Latin 
America, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond, tracing its presence into 
the present moment.

Rather than treating surrealism as an art-historical artifact or a 
closed chapter of modernism, this event examines its longevity and 
adaptability as a vanguard spirit of resistance, one that connects 
aesthetic experimentation to struggles against domination. What does it 
mean to recognize surrealism as both historically situated and epochal — 
rooted in specific contexts yet animated by an ethos that transcends 
them? How has its “continuous modus operandi” of linking creative 
production with anti-authoritarian praxis evolved from the exilic 
conditions of WWII through the upheavals of 1968, the crises of the 
neoliberal era, and even into present? Susik and Löwy invite us to 
reflect on surrealism’s ongoing relevance as a force of imagination and 
opposition in our own time.

*Bio:* Abigail Susik is the author of /Surrealist Sabotage and the War 
on Work/, editor of /Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and 
the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967/, and coeditor of the volumes 
/Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries/ and 
/Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance/. Susik is a 
founding board member of the International Society for the Study of 
Surrealism and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism 
Series. She lives in Portland, OR.

Michael Löwy is Research Director of Sociology at the Centre National de 
la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. His previous books include /Redemption 
and Utopia: Liberation Judaism in Central Europe/, /Marxism in Latin 
America/ and /The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America/.

Organized by Minor Compositions & COVER

This event will be edited into an episode of the Minor Compositions podcast.

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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