Black Surrealist

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 He published some 40 books and booklets, and wrote much more that is still unpublished, including novels, autobiographies, and a comprehensive guide to Africa-all the while cultivating what he thought of as his greatest artwork, his own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Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans's vast body of unpublished-and previously-unseen-work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats,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.

Steven Bellettois Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020), No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is an 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