– Naomi Klein on Surrealism beyond Europe

– Na Zhong recalls sitting for China’s infamously competitive college exam

Naomi Klein

• Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora by Robin DG Kelley
  
  Andre Breton, co-founder of the Surrealist movement, described it as a minority always "tending towards greater human emancipation". Within that minority was another: artists, poets, playwrights, dancers, and all-round agitators of African descent. Black, Brown & Beige collects lively profiles of dozens of these lesser-celebrated Surrealists.
  
• Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance edited by Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik
  
  Perhaps Surrealism wasn't just an interwar movement after all? Radical Dreams argues that undercurrents of Surrealism persisted in the counterculture from the 1960s through the 1980s. Surrealists threw in their lot with Black Power, environmental activists, Algerian freedom-fighters and protestors against the Vietnam War.
  
• L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston
  
  If surrealism was so devoutly committed to mining the unconscious and reorganising the real, how did photography – so literal, so external – come to form part of the movement? The answer lay in how photographers like Man Ray and Brassai practised their art, turning human flesh into symbols through manipulations of light. “In Man Ray’s Monument a D. A. F. de Sade,” Krauss and Livingston write, “our perception of nude buttocks is guided by an act of rotation, as the cruciform inner ‘frame’ for this image is transformed into the figure of the phallus.”

• Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work by Abigail Susik
  
  “It is without a doubt the subject of work which reveals the most foolish prejudices imbuing modern consciousness,” Breton wrote in 1925. The art historian Abigail Susik tracks the Surrealists’ borderline allergy to the notion of paid labour – of travail salarié – in human society, and in particular to the idea that art ought to be “produced” to satisfy a market.

• On Tropical Grounds: Avant-Garde and Surrealism in the Insular Atlantic by Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián
  
  The radicalism of interwar European art spread, but rarely remained unchanged. In the archipelagos of the Caribbean, avant-garde art and poetry sometimes succumbed to the European exoticisation of the tropical island – a colonising, exploitative fantasy. But it sometimes also resisted and undermined the European gaze.

Na Zhong

Each year, gaokao essay prompts make headlines in China. Unlike the science exams that consist primarily of multiple-choice questions and problem-solving, these prompts are open to interpretation, accessible, and often timely, designed to assess writing skills but also to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. The first one to grab national attention was “Honesty,” from the gaokao of 2001, when traditional values were being stressed by profound economic changes and social transformation. Another prompt that perplexed young test-takers five years later asked for an argumentative essay on “Vision,” echoing a broader public sentiment that, as living standards rose, it was time to look inward.

I was lousy at gaokao essays. Despite the test designers’ best intentions, the essays often become highly formulaic, since the exam’s sheer scale pushes graders to reward clear, predictable structures and conventional arguments. Schools, in turn, reinforce this by encouraging students to rely on memorised examples and safe viewpoints. Under intense pressure and given limited time, creativity becomes a liability. Entering the second half of our senior year, with almost weekly in-class exams and three major city-wide drills, our teachers would try to predict the essay prompt so we could prepare a repertoire of examples malleable enough to support almost any argument.

No one could have foreseen that less than a month before our gaokao, a massive earthquake would strike Wenchuan, a small town 130 kilometres from where I lived, sending our classroom floor rocking as if at sea. I remember thousands of students gathered on the track and field, dialling their parents’ numbers in vain. I remember lying awake that night with my roommates, my CD player looping as we braced for aftershocks. From my parents, I learned that my younger cousin’s middle school had collapsed, and she was being sent to a coastal city while her hometown struggled to rebuild.

Because of the earthquake, the exams for my province that year were much easier than expected. Even so, I remember my mind going blank at the essay prompt: “Resilience.” None of the examples I’d memorized – anecdotes from the lives of leaders, inventors and the literati – seemed applicable. Even as I scribbled through my essay, I knew it was terrible, and my score confirmed it. It never occurred to me that I could draw from real life – and that, to me, remains the greatest irony of the gaokao.