This chapter examines the history of Black diasporic fiction in the Atlantic world as it informed, and continues to be informed by, the artistic and geopolitical coordinates of the surrealist movement. From the surrealist interest in and appropriation of Blackness in Jazz-age Paris through the post-WWII development of pan-African and Third World movements, the writing and cultural production of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American intellectuals fuelled the global development of leftist and anti-colonial politics. So too did Black writing and art both inform and, in part, constitute the proliferation of aesthetic radicalism throughout the Atlantic world. This chapter traces the intersecting histories of surrealism, existentialism, and the Black radical tradition through the production of fiction; in doing so it traces the politics of literary activism – as well as the vexed histories of racism, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and erasure – in the work of Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It contends not only that surrealism should be understood as a significant coordinate in the Black radical tradition (as e.g. Robin D.G. Kelley has demonstrated), but also that the surrealist movement is inconceivable without an appraisal of its relation to race, diaspora, and the writing and cultural production of Black intellectuals.

This essay explores how the African novel has confronted the problem of nation and nationalism. While Europe had centuries to adapt to the centrifugal processes of nation formation, Africa had no such luxury of time. The work of nationhood in Africa was a shock imposition, and this shock was captured by African writers in and as storytelling of fragmentation, disruption, and the eventual dissociation of the protagonists from the project of national and individual psychological development. African writers’ turn to the interior – in novels, epics, or praise-songs – was, in fact, a political gesture. Bringing into discussion writers from René Maran to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola to Ahmadou Kourouma, Maryse Condé, as well as writers associated with the Afropolitan like Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, this chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century African literature fought to find the space in which the complex dialectic engagement between the individual psyche and the world can be staged and reimagined.

This chapter continues the historical investigation in subsequent decades, covering the Cold War, new interdisciplinary initiatives and hidden connections between key thinkers. We look particularly at the experimental interdisciplinarity of James March especially in light of Herbert Marcuse’s work and influences.