Was Surrealism a Humanism? The Case of Michel Leiris

Abstract

This essay investigates some paradoxes in the career of surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris. Looking at how objects, animals, and people of color appear throughout his work, the author raises some cautions about current critical enthusiasm about the posthuman under the sign of the animal turn.

Keywords:

• animal
• colonialism
• ethnography
• object
• race
• surrealism

Notes

1. Fanon cites Leiris's “Martinique-Guadeloupe-Haiti” (originally published in Temps modernes, 1950) approvingly, as a knowledgeable authority. Leiris is one of very few White writers Fanon uses in this way; the essay largely takes issue with Jean-Paul Sartre, and elsewhere in the text he dismisses André Breton and scathingly criticizes Octave Mannoni.

2. Leiris later agreed. See Price and Jamin, “A Conversation” 162 and passim; see also Leiris, “Jazz” 102. See also Beaujour.

3. Clarck-Taoua is aware of this: She cites, in support of her condemnation, analyses by Jean Jamin that he intended to point in the other direction.

4. Despite this infamous remark, and despite Fanon's devastating critique in Peau noire masques blancs, Mannoni's book Prospero and Caliban remains surprisingly undiscredited and is still reprinted, read, and taught.

5. Armel 297. See Carolyn Dean for a detailed discussion of Borel and of the relationship between surrealism and psychoanalysis, although unfortunately Dean overlooks Leiris.