[Minorcompositions] Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism

[Minor Compositions]

*Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and 
Anti-authoritarianism <https://youtu.be/HAy5KLmvouY>*

This discussion 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/.

Image from Gee Vaucher’s “A Week of Knots” project

Also available on all the usual podcast platforms.

-- 
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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/minorcompositions/attachments/20250916/a638dc9e/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: JAGS-thumbnail.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 1114670 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/minorcompositions/attachments/20250916/a638dc9e/attachment-0001.jpg>