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<p><b><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://youtu.be/HAy5KLmvouY">Minor
Compositions Podcast Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and
Anti-authoritarianism</a></b></p>
<p><img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.kNitH9Xq.KwT1pBOC@gmail.com" alt="" width="1280"
height="720">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 <i>Journal of Avant-Garde
Studies</i>, 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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and
the War on Work, editor of <i>Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical
Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967</i>,
and coeditor of the volumes <i>Surrealism and Film After 1945:
Absolutely Modern Mysteries</i> and <i>Radical Dreams:
Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance.</i> 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. <br>
<br>
Michael Löwy is Research Director of Sociology at the Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. His previous books
include <i>Redemption and Utopia: Liberation Judaism in Central
Europe</i>, <i>Marxism in Latin America</i> and <i>The War of
the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America</i>.<br>
<br>
Image from Gee Vaucher’s “A Week of Knots” project<br>
<br>
Also available on all the usual podcast platforms.</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.minorcompositions.info">https://www.minorcompositions.info</a>
Linktree of all our stuff: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions">https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions</a></pre>
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