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Remade in America

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It is often assumed that surrealism did not survive beyond the Second World War and that it struggled to take root in America. This book challenges both assumptions, arguing that some of the most innovative...
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  • 21 September 2021
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It is often assumed that surrealism did not survive beyond the Second World War and that it struggled to take root in America. This book challenges both assumptions, arguing that some of the most innovative responses to surrealism in the postwar years took place not in Europe or the gallery but in the United States, where artistic and activist communities repurposed the movement for their own ends. Far from moribund, surrealism became a form of political protest implicated in broader social and cultural developments, such as the Black Arts movement, the counterculture, the New Left, and the gay liberation movement. From Ted Joans to Marie Wilson, artists mobilized surrealism’s defining interests in desire and madness, the everyday and the marginalized, to craft new identities that disrupted gender, sexual, and racial norms. Remade in America ultimately shows that what began as a challenge to church, family, and state in interwar Paris was invoked and rehabilitated to diagnose and breach inequalities in postwar America.

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Price: $65.00
Pages: 296
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 21 September 2021
Trim Size: 10.00 X 7.00 in
ISBN: 9780520309043
Format: Hardcover
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"​​Remade in America reveals what the protesters at the 1968 MoMA exhibition knew well—that Surrealism’s potency lay in its ability to evolve, in its very refusal to be history, giving shape to a far more multidimensional picture of the diversity of American art."


"Pawlik’s central and novel insight is that the reception and subsequent remaking of Surrealism along queer and non-white lines, among other marginalized identities, is predicated upon the perception of its minoritarianism. Also key is the view that Surrealism was alive and well after 1940, indeed that it flourished in several locations around the globe, and that these iterations (not mere afterlives) of the movement deserve careful, situated, and context-sensitive consideration on their own creative merits."

“Tracing Surrealism’s impact as far afield as Korea and the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum’s 2021 exhibition ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ set into relief its truly transnational reach. Published the same year, Joanna Pawlick’s volume offers a more in-depth consideration of a specific aspect of this reach: the movement’s varied and often surprising afterlife in the United States.”
 
Joanna Pawlik is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex and has published widely on surrealism and American art and culture.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Re-Viewing Surrealism: Charles Henri Ford's Poem Posters (1964–65)
2. Encountering Surrealism: Nadja (1928) and Autobiographical Beat Writing
3. Blackening Surrealism: Ted Joans's Ethnographic Surrealist Historiography 
4. Turning on Surrealism: Queer Psychedelia
5. Hystericizing Surrealism: The Marvelous in Popular Culture 
Postscript 

Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index