AFROSURREAL

The Afro-Surreal Manifesto

| Sheree

Considering D. Scot. Miller’s essay , Afrosurreal Manifesto
“I was there…” – Black is the New Black, a 21st century Manifesto.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas‘ 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’ “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one … the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life.” The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afro-Surreal!

This was my first brush up against the term Afro-Surreal, even though as soon as I read what it means/ what it is, I knew in my bones that I’ve been living it, I’ve been experiencing it from time.

Miller takes the time to lay out what Afro-Surrealism is NOT.

Afro-Surrealism is not SURREALISM or AFRO-FUTURISM

SURREALISM is a white, European, literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the subconscious. It’s dreamlike, fantastic imagery and an illogical juxtaposition of subject matter.

Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: “European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical. Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement “is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black.”

AFRO-FUTURISM

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. 

Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need to speculate about the disasters that are coming our way or are just around the corner, somewhere in the future. The worst case scenarios of bombs, genocide, floods, fires and destruction are here now.

What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afro-Surrealists expose this from a “future-past” called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW. Trump is President of USA and is destroying/ dismantling democracy over there, at the same time as creating wars and genocide around the world.

RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this “browning” of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.

Miller, at the time of writing this manifesto, professes that San Francisco is the land of Afro-Surreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman. San Francisco where black artists are changing the narrative , “to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.”

Briefly, the ‘A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL’ includes:

  1. The unknown worlds and wonders are emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, Jean-Michel Basquiat,Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet, Zora Neale, Chester Himes etc.
  2. Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.
  3. Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past, revisiting the old ways with new eyes. Appropriating symbols of the past, conjuring the ancients for now.
  4. Like the collage of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the use of excess is used as subversion. Hybridization is a form of rebellion, refusal, disobedience.
  5. Afro-Surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killa. We look to Kehinde Wiley.
  6. The Afro-Surrealist life is fluid, cannot be pinned down. Afro-Surrealists are ambiguous and reject servitude.
  7. The Afro-Surrealist wears a mask while reading Leopold Senghor.
  8. Think Prince. The Afro-Surrealist seeks definition in the absurdity of a “post-racial” world.
  9. In fashion (John Galliano; Yohji Yamamoto) and the theater (Suzan Lori-Parks), Afro-Surreal excavates the remnants of this post-apocalypse with dandified flair, a smooth tongue and a heartless heart.
  10. Afro-Surrealists create sensuous gods to hunt down beautiful collapsed icons.

This Afro-Surreal Manifesto is Afro-Surreal.

Where am I at with Afro-Surreal?

| Sheree

Afro-Surreal was the word I chose for 2026. My guiding word of the year. I might not have posted a lot about it here, and yet, it has been a constant so far, bubbling away in the background. Shimmering away just beneath the surface, ready to boil to the top, or over when something happens to question or disrupt my reality.

I chose Afr0-Surreal as my word of the year because I was doing it already. I had finally found a word for what I was experiencing and I wanted to explore it further. Unpick it, hold it up to the light and examine it closely.

In a sense, it’s an attempt to go back to the beginning, go back to the source of this term and its meaning and how it does show up in my life and practice.

D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote “The Afro-surreal Manifesto”. He is the source who coined the term. He could only find the term being used one time before this by Amiri Baraka, who used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. Miller went to Baraka asking him if he had any issue with him using Afro-Surreal and running with the term and concept. Miller asked permission and was granted it. Since then Afro-Surreal / Afro-Surrealism has gone on to be a genre or school of art and literature.

I’ll start my study with looking at what Miller has to say about Afro-Surreal and continue from there as since 2009, Miller came out in October 2024 to say that Afro-Surrealism is dead. And when I read this I was like, noooooo. I’ve just come to the party and it’s over? But then on further reading I totally get why Miller is saying this.

Go back re-read the paragraphs I have already written about the inception, the birth of Afro-Surrealism. And then imagine or consider this, predominately white institutions, universities, academics trying to erase the work, trying to erase the manifesto created by Miller in 2009 as the beginning of Afro-Surrealism, trying to change the history of Afro-Surrealism, sound familiar?

We’ll be exploring this and more but let’s get things straight from the start, the names we need to know and give credit to. Amiri Baraka and D. Scot Miller. Remember those names as we insert them back into history, into their rightful places of the founding fathers of Afro-surrealism. And as Miller has said lately, in 2024:

So what to do?

When Brooklyn Rail contacted me, I understood the impact and reach of the publication, and after some serious reflection, it came to me that if I brought Afrosurrealism to life, I was the only person to be able to announce its demise in order to divorce my vision from this white-led hostile takeover. So I killed Afrosurrealism in front of the very people who need it alive in order to feed off of it.

AFROSURREALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE AFROSURREALISM!

Coming in late

| Sheree

I’ve been coming later and later to my creative sketchbook practice this month.

It’s day 123. 123 days since I started this practice of play within my creative sketchbook. Daily.

This piece tonight is significant because it chimes with my word of the year/ focus of the year being AFROSURREAL.

The right now. Capturing the now.

AFROSURREAL has been bubbling below the surface all year so far. I’m thinking it’s about time to share my musings and thinkings here in a mini series of posts.

Everything is overlapping and I’m fixing to gain some clarity knowing fine well that the practice of writing it out will only throw up more questions than answers.

The Matterings of (ordinary) Black Life is the practice. The push back against the colonial, historical categorisation of black people as subhuman. As stereotype as no life beyond the construct.

Right now. Black life. Black aliveness.

I’m living a/my reality which isn’t acknowledged or if is then it’s challenged/ denied/ erased.

It’s important to storytell, mythmake, historicise and archive within these liminal spaces. Centre the margins where these matterings happen.

Through the reconstruction and recalibration, healing and reparative processes challenge the exclusions and colonial impulses to conquer, control and exploit.

Expect to read more around AFROSURREAL and the overlaps with my other obsessions as through my research and readings and writings, I attempt to come to some understanding of myself and my creativity, moving backward and forwards between the now and beyond.

the abuse of power is coming home to roost

| Sheree

What is your mission?

If you’ve been watching the news this week, you’ve seen that it’s been dominated by what is happening in America. Or the actions America has taken elsewhere in the world. Flexing their muscles, going in for the strike.

In my opinion, what is happening, right now, is that white people can see the power of the state being used against people who look just like them.

This is where AfroSurrealism takes on significance – because the reality of blackness is the power of the state is always and, repeated for centuries and generations, been used against black people. Being black is a surreal experience. THEN. RIGHT NOW. ALWAYS.

The abuse of power has been turned up to the max so that no one is safe. But some people can’t see this yet. Maybe even deny it, spin a false narrative around it.

There’s a quote somewhere that I remember which goes something along the lines as, they’ll come for me in the evening, but then they’ll come for you in the morning.

Fascism had raised its head once again. But did it ever go away for black and brown bodies? Did it not just change its mask, switched up its playbook?

There’s protests across American cities against the unlawful killing of a white woman/ mother by an ICE agent. These protesters scream out, “say her name.”

The thing is this – no disrespect or condoning of this violence or unlawful killing as it is an abuse of power and murder. I am outraged but …

I am also outraged because #SayHerName was an awareness campaign started by Kimberle Crenshaw to bring attention to the unlawful killings of black women by law enforcement that were going unreported/ not getting the same level of outrage and attention as when black men and boys are killed by law enforcement, in comparison. And this doesn’t even start into the ‘white woman syndrome.’

#SayHerName was needed to highlight and remember and get justice (?) for black women who have been killed in custody, or when calling 911 for help, or when sleeping in their beds, or for just breathing while black.

#SayHerName is needed for these unlawful killings of black women not for the white woman killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday because everybody knows her name and everybody is saying her name.

What happened in Minneapolis was wrong and the Trump administration is lying about it and blaming the victim. This is an abuse of power and is being played out, as the images of the bloodied seat and the bullet hole in the windshield, as a threat.

You get in the way of us, protest our regime then this is what happens to you, is the message. They rule with fear, threats and intimidation. The ICE agent is immune from prosecution because he was just doing his job. His job for the state. Above the law. Lawlessness is the state. This is the only way to get the mass of population behind a fascist society. Fear, threats and intimidation.

Check the historical playbook.

The reality though, the truth that has to be stated otherwise I’d be silenced through fear and intimidation, is that #SayHerNane centred black women, centred blackness. But using it here in this instance for the murder of a white woman, this is just another thing that is whitewashed and co-opted by white people.

I’m thinking this and berating myself for thinking this. Condemning myself for seeing this play out in reality. I had to go online and check myself. Check that I’m not being unreasonable, or hateful or wrong. But I’m not alone in seeing this reality.

This truth.

( And do you also notice how much and often I’m couching my opinion in diplomatic ways, highlighting my intentions not to cause harm. Obviously needed as far too often people choose to see only part of the argument. Take issue with what isn’t the real issue as a means of not listening and not addressing the real issue! Kill the messenger and all that!)

I also have to ask ( myself, anybody else) if the woman who was killed by ICE was black or brown would there be such media attention, protests, calls for justice? Would her unlawful killing/ murder be used as a touchstone, as a moment that changes American history moving forward? Or would that be another case of #SayHerName?

I say this not to distract from the horrendous crime that has been committed by the state against a white woman. I say this because it’s all part of the same system that has been operating for centuries and it is just now, in this moment, that more people, white people are seeing that this shit is killing them too. It has been all along but just slower than black people (Fred Moten).

These are strange times (white) people are arguing. Democracy is being eroded. Violence is no longer buried and concealed. Violence is (now) at their (white) doors.

AfroSurreal. This has always been the reality of blackness. The violence. The absurdity of it all. No rhyme or reason except profits and power.

Now white people are waking up to seeing on their feeds people who look like them being murdered by the state. Unlawfully murdered by the state for demanding justice and fairness.

It’s awful that some (white) people are just starting to experience the dangers of oppression right now.

This is nothing new for / to black people. And saying this isn’t to wish ill will on anyone else or to take glee or satisfaction in violence inflicted on anybody.

Just speaking truth to reality.

The verdict is in about the word of the year, 2026

| Sheree
Damon Davis and Kiki Salem

If you’ve been around here for a few years then you’ll know that I choose a word each year to act as a guiding source for the year ahead.

I hold this word lightly as a beacon to support my movement through the year as I navigate through society, this world, with the ebb and flow of commitments, responsibilities, projects and inspirations. 

Last year, fugitivity took hold of me and kept me refusing those things that have already been refused of me throughout the year. 

Fugitivity and visual journaling went hand in hand in 2025 to the point that I was able to create a loophole of retreat, a space of freedom and play for most of 2025. No doubt fugitivity is changing my life and remains in my rucksack as I traverse into 2026. The year of the horse ( more on that later).

So what is my word of 2026? 

Usually I have something chosen at the back end of Oct moving into November. It just comes to me, lands and takes up root as something that just feels right. And something I want to carry for a year or more and explore.

That didn’t happen this year. 

I had the feeling of being ‘unapologetic’ to the max but that felt, as a word, so dated. I feel it has been co-opted by mainstream and capitalist culture that to hear it now feel so twee for me. It’s original radical power being neutered.

Then we had radicale ( with an ‘e’) meaning to get to the basic root of something. Its natural origin. It’s fundamental and essential, changing from the roots. As well as radical being judged as unconventional, pushing things to the limits.

But again this word didn’t sit well within my gut. I wasn’t feeling it.

For me my word of the year has to be embrewed with feelings as well as be able to stand the test of time, the year and beyond, as well as act as talisman, inspiration and haven. Words of the past has included voice, water, shakti, open, listen, love etc. 

I have a tall ask for my word of the year but none of my words of the year so far has let me down. I suppose it’s a difficult act to follow after fugitivity as this practice has changed my life in so many ways.

But choose a word of the year I will because after so long in this practice, I would feel naked walking into 2026 without some word(s) at my back as support and/both motivator.

I’m making the commitment here now to go with – AfroSurreal – as my words of 2026.

Of course AfroSurreal is much more than a word it’s a whole artist and literary movement which blends the weird and absurd with the reality of blackness. That the reality of blackness, being black today is  surreal. 

AfroSurreal is  also a way of {BEING} that roots me further into the RIGHT NOW. Creating the future that has to happen right now. 

I’ll be exploring more and sharing about AfroSurreal over the next couple of days to get my basis understanding and direction down. And then look out for more posts about how I’m moving and shaking with AfroSurreal(ism) for the coming year.

I’m excited to see where this word will take me. A good sign if any that I’m chosen the right word ( movement) for 2026.