CPD Paper Prize Honourable Mention 2024 - Towards an Anticolonial Aesthetic Politics: Surrealist Praxis & Epistemic Refusal

RIS Editor Cian O'Driscoll talks to Sara Wong (LSE) about her paper which was a runner up in the BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group's third annual Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize.

The paper offers a conceptually rich and beautifully written engagement with aesthetic production, surrealism and ‘the international order’, through the lens of anticolonial thought. Its originality is immediately apparent, as Sara Wong takes us on a journey against the normally bounded European sites of cultural movements, to the work of Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire and René Ménil, and other Caribbean Surrealist writers that inspired her thinking. She then grounds her analysis of anticolonial surrealism - art that is, as she puts it ‘beyond a movement, a selection of methods, a genre or a set of ideas’ - in an ethnographic engagement with the artistic interventions of an exiled Myanmar artist. In her work, we find at stake so much more than a discussion of artistic methods and politics; she unravels surrealist praxis as a form of epistemic refusal, one which, as she claims “manifests both politically and aesthetically, thus allowing for a wider spectrum of what constitutes politics”. We were truly inspired by the conceptual leap taken in this paper.