Description
The aesthetic turn in IR and politics has yet to fully take into account the emancipatory imperatives from the de/post/anti-colonial literatures. In placing the decolonial as central to the aesthetic, and the aesthetic as central to the decolonial, this paper seeks to bring together literatures otherwise siloed in IR and politics. This compartmentalisation of theories, histories, methods and sensibilities strips decolonial praxis of its aesthetic power whilst simultaneously sanitizing aesthetic politics of its radical histories and potentialities. Focusing on the anticolonial writings of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, I argue that an interdisciplinary engagement with surrealism gives us a “magical and dazzling” epistemology for decolonial aesthetic theory and praxis. In order to decenter a Eurocentric perspective on decolonial surrealism, I employ Said’s concept of “Travelling Theory” to understand the ways in which surrealism has and could move through space, time and cultural contexts. In doing so, I position surrealism as a radical political epistemology that is translocal, transtemporal and liberatory.
