Black Surrealist - by Steven Belletto (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Black Surrealist. Poet. Artist. Jazz trumpeter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "poem-life." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work. In the over 30 books of poetry and prose he published in his lifetime, Joans makes visible links among key artistic and political movements of the 20th century that are seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beat movement, Pan-Africanism, and Black Power. Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, this critical literary biography explores Joans's life as told through these relationships and through his remarkable creative output, which often explored his life and its connections to wider aesthetic and political experiences of the 20th century"--

Book Synopsis

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "poem-life." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work.

The proportions of Ted Joans's life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his "jazz action" paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim. But at the height of his success, Joans left the States for Europe and Africa, and set up bases of operation in places such as Paris, Copenhagen, Tangier, and Timbuktu. He would spend the subsequent decades in constant movement around the globe, an itinerant poet, interdisciplinary artist, and self-styled "Surrealist griot" who was especially attuned to the magnetic power of chance encounters. He published some 40 books and booklets, and wrote much more that is still unpublished, including novels, autobiographies, and a comprehensive guide to Africa-all the while cultivating what he thought of as his greatest artwork, his own "poem-life."

Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans's vast body of unpublished-and previously-unseen-work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power, among them, while always remaining a true original. Ted Joans's poem-life and body of work are unlike any other in the 20th Century, and Black Surrealist, illustrated with over 70 images, many never before published, is the first book to reckon with this singularly important poet-artist, and to show how and why his creative spirit lives on.

Review Quotes

Black Surrealist is pure light illuminating the long night of blues and beats, humor and hunger, freedom and flight, myth and memory, love and sex, art and improvisation that is the poetic life of Ted Joans. Steven Belletto plumbed the Marvelous and produced a magnificent tapestry depicting not only Joans's surrealist world but surrealism's Black world. Ted Lives! Dig?
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a fascinating and unconventional biography for an even more fascinating and unconventional artist. Expansive and thoroughly researched, this book will be a revelation for those of us who have known Joans primarily through his more widely available poetry collections and his most anthologized poems. Belletto may at times fall under the spell of his subject, but he nonetheless paints an engaging portrait in which we see Joans-the man of strong passions, politics, and contradictions, as well as the enigmatic, charismatic creator-with new clarity.
Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joansis a sorely needed critical biography of a poet and artist who made a profound impact on experimental movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from surrealism to the Black Arts Movement. Belletto's eminently readable biography deftly situates Joans in the artistic, political, and literary contexts in which he lived, traversing the three continents and eight decades of Joans's life. This study is especially well attuned to the plasticity of 'facts' in Joans's life, brilliantly illuminating the relentless work of critical fabulation through which Joans fashioned his life and art alike.
Jonathan P. Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies, The Pennylvania State University, USA

About the Author

Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020) and No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012). He is the editor of four books, including American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is the Editor of Contemporary Literature.