“But what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?”, wrote Cuban author Alejo Carpentier in the preface of The Kingdom of This World ([New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux], 2017: [page: xx]). This rhetorical question firmly resonates when studying Surrealism in Latin America. Scholars have given significant attention to the idea of the marvellous in visual arts and literature to define the inventions and reinventions of Surrealism in the New World. However, we could also rethink the marvellous in relation to the utopian impulse and discourses that have shaped the history of Latin America, especially during the second half of the 20th century.

This session will explore Surrealist manifestations from the 1960s and 1970s, a period in the history of Latin America characterised by its socialist utopias. During these decades, multiple cultural exchanges between Latin American and European artists took place, revealing a great interest in Latin American revolutionary processes. How did the utopian discourses and interactions between artists inform Surrealist practice in Latin America and other contexts during this period? Do these encounters reveal a new understanding of the political and revolutionary scope of Surrealism in Latin America and Europe?

This session invites papers examining Surrealist practices in visual arts and literature engaged with ideas and discourses that configured the revolutionary impulse of this period in Latin America.

Paulina Caro Troncoso, University of Edinburgh, paulina.carotroncoso@ed.ac.uk

For more information, please visit Association for Art History website.