The Brooklyn Rail

May 20th, 2024 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Afrosurreal Manifesto, published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Before writing the manifesto, I checked in with Amiri Baraka and Google to see if the word had been used as an artistic framework. There was only one entry. Keziah Jones, in his album Black Orpheus (2003) had a song called “Afrosurrealismfortheladies.” Aside from that, the only other entries referred to Baraka’s essays on Henry Dumas written in the early 1970s. Having met Baraka in the late-nineties, I interviewed him a few times and got permission to expand the term beyond the pantheon he created. I infused other movements—like Négritude and NeoHooDoo—into the term. I didn’t coin the term “Afrosurrealism”; I simply went directly to the source and root word “Afrosurreal” and turned it into an artistic framework for shining light on overlooked artists, writers, and thinkers. Individuals who shaped an aesthetic that had yet to be named.

I genuinely didn’t think my manifesto would survive the year, and though I received some praise for it locally—including talk of an exhibit at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) which never materialized—by 2010, I’d assumed that it had died. There were no Google entries on the term besides my now long-dead blog, “Afrosurreal Generation,” where I’d planned to clock what the manifesto generated in the zeitgeist—which at the time, was nothing.

I outlined the manifesto’s rapid trajectory and detractors from 2009 to 2016 in my essay “Affrosurreal: The Marvelous and The Invisible 2016” when I became a columnist-in-residence for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. By 2016, I was fairly certain that the Afrosurreal Arts movement had made an impact, but I also witnessed academics and artists trying to steal my work and redefine its history to suit their personal and professional agendas. For years, I tried to fight these erasures, but they became too many too often. Correcting them would have constituted a full-time job. I remember thinking sometime in 2018—which Afropunk dubbed “The Year of Afrosurrealism,” and the Guardian ran a piece on Afrosurrealism that didn’t mention me but stole most of its references from my SFMoMA writings—that people were creating works in a genre I created, but from which I had been black-balled in order for the erasure to happen. No one in the industry ever solicited me, and I was excluded from the movement my manifesto created. Ironically, Afrosurrealism was treated as a subgenre of Surrealism, when no art critic with integrity would say that Surrealism is a subgenre of Realism, or that the writer of an art movement’s manifesto isn’t the founder of that movement.

Though none claimed it at first, movies like Sorry To Bother You (2018) and Get Out (2017) and TV shows like Atlanta (2016–22) started getting placed in the Afrosurrealism pantheon. But it wasn’t until February 2023 when Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions acknowledged me and my work in a TikTok post that most of the erasure began to subside somewhat. As honored as I was by this post, they also added the hashtag #BHM2023, short for Black History Month 2023, suggesting that my manifesto was from the distant past, which I suppose it is now.

In 2024, I can Google “Afrosurrealism” and find thousands of citations and references ranging from academic papers, to museums and art galleries, to plays, to music, to books, movies and television shows. What I also find is that the erasure of its origins is all but complete. The number of times my name and my manifesto aren’t mentioned far outweigh the times when they are, and the original intent and references of the document have been absolutely obscured, mostly so others can claim what they truly have no claim over and turn it into white-led, Black-only capitalist enterprises, and not the Black-led multi-racial coalitions that the manifesto seeks to inspire.

This is not to say that some institutions, artists and young people, especially academics in Europe and the Antilles, haven’t contacted me, cited me correctly or are trying to expand or work from the Afrosurreal Manifesto. Just that they are being drowned out by bad-faith actors and erasure-oriented schemers.

I find this situation analogous to De La Soul’s debut album, Three Feet High and Rising. They too changed the parameters of a genre through hybridization and expansion of vocabulary, only to be discredited and erased as the innovators. So much so that they titled their sophomore album, De La Soul is Dead.

Afrosurrealism may not be dead, but in its current perverted iteration, it’s certainly dead to me.