Black Surrealist

"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"--

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.

List of Illustrations Preface List of Abbreviations Part I. Poem-Life 1. Life As Art 2. Born Swinging 3. The Mystery of Theodore Jones, Sr. 4. Famous in Louisville Part II. Biting the Big Apple 5. The Most Celebrated Actress in the World 6. Inside the Magnetic Fields 7. Home to Harlem 8. The World of Langston Hughes 9. Babs Gonzales and the Origin of "The .38" 10. Greenwich Village, Experiment in Democracy 11. The Mau Mau Take Manhattan 12. Salvador Dalí at the St. Regis 13. Meeting Joyce and the Galerie Fantastique 14. Bird Lives! 15. The Coming of the Beat Generation 16. Coffeehouse Connection 17. Poet-In-Residence at Café Bizarre 18. Funky Jazz Poems 19. All of Ted Joans and No More 20. If You Should See a Man . . . 21. The Notorious Rent-a-Beatnik Business 22. The Hipsters 23. André Breton and the Seeds of Self-Exile Part III. Africa and Beyond Africa 24. Tangier / Interzone 25. "The Rhinoceros Story" 26. Timbuktu Ted 27. Grete Moljord 28. "Spadework: The Autobiography of a Hipster" 29. Babyshow 30. Happenings in Copenhagen 31. On the Black Arts Movement and Négritude 32. Meeting Malcolm X 33. Black Cultural Guerilla 34. A Black Man's Guide to Africa 35. Black Pow-Wow to Afrodisia 36. New Doors to Surrealism 37. Spetrophilia and the Dutch Scene Part IV. Hip Ambassador to the World 38. Le Griot Surrealiste 39. Festac '77 to USIS 40. "Deeper Are Allyall's Roots" 41. In Residence in West Berlin 42. Dies und Das: A Magazine of Contemporary Surrealist Interest 43. The Seven Sons of Lautréamont 44. "Razzle Dazzle" 45. Teducation Films 46. Paris, Chance-Filled Paradise 47. Jim Haynes, Handshake Press, and Duck Butter Poems 48. Merveilleux Coup de Foudre at Shakespeare and Company 49. Laurated Coda: Atmospheric Rivers Notes Bibliography Index