An examination of surrealisms unofficial ethnography of marginalized subjectivities
In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as ethnographic surrealism. In The Persistence of Masks, Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years through a close look at the reviews Documents (192930) and Minotaure (193339) as well as the surrealist writer-turned-ethnographer Michel Leiriss ethnography of possession. Analyzing surrealist aesthetic criticism, art, poetry, and field research in terms of a common interest in marginalized modes of subjectivity, Cheng argues that the surrealists used the figures of the mask, the veil, the hand, and the hat to radically reconceive the subject as nonhegemonic, nonanthropocentric, and feminine-identified.
Though ethnographic surrealism usually refers to the collaboration between professional ethnologists at the Institut de lEthnologie in Paris and Georges Batailles so-called dissident circle of surrealists, Cheng demonstrates that surrealisms unofficial ethnography began long before the founding of the movement. Starting with AndrÉ Bretons wartime text Subject (1916), written when he was still a young psychiatric intern treating traumatized soldiers, she shows how the future surrealist poet shifted from a clinical to a para-ethnographic approach to subjectivity when adopting his patients first-person voice as a textual mask.
Revealing surrealism to be always implicitly ethnographic, Cheng uncovers deep affinities between archrivals Breton and Bataille, highlights psychiatrys underacknowledged role in surrealisms lay ethnography, and theorizes the surrealists feminine identification as a means of critiquing power. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, The Persistence of Masks offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture.
