Schmidt-Rimpler Dinh, Kalvin;
(2025)
Symbols and Cymbals: On Afro-Surreal Expressionism.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis complicates our understanding of Amiri Baraka’s notion of “Afro-Surreal Expressionism” (1988). I approach this neologism as the instantiation of a poetics rather than an easily definable ‘style’ or organised ‘movement’ – a provisional set of provocations which can teach us a way of thinking about experimental Black American aesthetic practices at mid-century. While critics and practitioners have responded to Baraka’s term in rich and varied ways, they have typically emphasised its ‘Surreal’ component at the expense of any stringent discussion of its ‘Expressionism’. This tendency does not properly account for Baraka’s own history, obscuring the complexities of how modernism was mediated to him and the agonistic politics of form that his work both interrogates and enacts. Furthermore, much of Afro-Surreal Expressionism’s relationship to the visual field has been left unexamined. My dissertation partially redresses these oversights from art historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. Following Baraka’s own historical emphasis, I focus on the latter half of the Great Migration, circa 1940–70. My case studies span diverse media: Baraka’s essays, poetry, fiction, and critically overlooked drawings; Richard Wright’s engagements with documentary photography between 1941–57; Romare Bearden’s turn to collage in the mid-1960s; Loïs Mailou Jones’s Afrocentric paintings between 1938–68; and Ted Joans’s interdisciplinary practice turned ‘way of life’. Through these figures, I explore how the visual field can illuminate and be illuminated by the “polyrhythm[s]”, “refract[ions]”, and uncanny “strangeness” of history and experience that Baraka’s conspicuously composite language both describes and formally models. Simultaneously, by heeding the broader restlessness of his thought, I contend that while Baraka’s inventive words are deeply meaningful, they are not final. What he points to is an open-ended, non-linear method for writing the messy histories of race and modernism, and for probing ideas of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism ‘from below’.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Symbols and Cymbals: On Afro-Surreal Expressionism |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | modernism, racism and racialisation, modernity and the Black Atlantic, twentieth-century US-American art history |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History of Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215479 |
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