On Tropical Grounds: Avant-Garde and Surrealism in the Insular Atlantic(Critical South)

On Tropical Grounds develops a new approach to the avant-garde and Surrealism in Caribbean and Atlantic studies. The book examines how islands and their tropical associations figure in the cultural and political imaginaries of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and identifies genealogies of local responses to continental fantasies of exotic insularity. Examining written and visual works that reflect on the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean and the Canary Islands, as well as critical debates around discourses of insularity in island and metropolitan spaces, this book considers notions of ethnic purity, originality, imitation, appropriation, cosmopolitanism, and self-exoticism to challenge the idea that avant-garde practices were pre-eminently urban and metropolitan cultural forms.  The book argues that attention to the relational dimension implicit in exchanges around ideas of anticolonial struggle, radical social transformation, and anti-fascist resistance should inform analyses of cultural production in Caribbean and Atlantic insular spaces. On Tropical Grounds develops a persuasive critical model for the investigation of politically and aesthetically situated archipelagic relations that transgresses disciplinary boundaries and reconfigures our conception of the avant-garde as a global movement that was overdetermined by racial, gender, and colonial conflicts. This book will be of value to anyone interested in Caribbean and Atlantic studies, avant-garde and visual culture studies, and literary and cultural studies.

Table of Contents:
Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Foreword – Richard Rosa xv Introduction: On Tropical Grounds 1 Part I. Atlantic, Hispanic, Avant-Garde: Archaic Places / Non-European Regressions 1 Around the Atlantic Avant-Garde: Insular Dreamworlds / Archaic Islandscapes 21 2 Male Regressions: The Non-Europeans 56 Part II. Caribbean, Colonial, Avant-Garde: From Poesía Negra to Carceral Romances 3 Islands of Desire: A Poetics of Antillean Fragmentation 101 4 Carceral, Island, Nation: Cuban Romances in Photography and Fiction 134 Part III. Surrealism after France: Crime and Desire from the Canary Islands to the Americas 5 Surrealism and the Islands: The Practice of Dislocation 171 6 Difficult Dialogues: Surrealism in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean 206 Epilogue: Preface to the 1950s 246 Notes 255 Index 299

About the Author :
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián is Professor of Hispanic and Visual Culture Studies at Durham University.

Review :
“On Tropical Grounds executes a cultural, intellectual, and literary history of striking depth and inimitable originality. Avant-garde canons of knowledge are constellated as they separate but hold together the idea of island, islandness, and insularity running through the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean and the Canary Islands. This mosaic of resounding thoughts is literary and visual theory, not of a particular time, but it is a vital reference for our time. It is a must-read for all those who are thinking about the Caribbean and the Atlantic world vis-à-vis​ dynamic but often hard-to-articulate traces, disruptive spaces, conceptual grasps.” Claudia Milian, Duke University