Black Surrealist

The Legend of Ted Joans

Professor Steven Belletto (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

304 Seiten

2025
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-7954-3 (ISBN)

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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 “lifepoem.” 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.

A painter and musician who ultimately made his name as a writer, Joans defies easy categorization: known to students of Beat lore as bon vivant of the New York bohemian scene of the 1950s, he left this scene in 1961 to connect with his African roots and live in the remotest place he could think of: Timbuktu. For the rest of his life Joans moved between Timbuktu and Paris, Tangier and New York City, earning the moniker “tri-continental poet.” 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. Joans’s connection to these movements is best understood through his relationships with a dazzling array of cultural and literary figures, from Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to Black writers Langston Hughes, Hart Leroy Bibbs, and Ishmael Reed, Surrealists André Breton, Charles Henri Ford, and Joyce Mansour, as well as countless other writers, artists, and musicians.

Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, this critical literary biography explores Joans’s life and times as told through these relationships and through his remarkable output of creative work, which often explored his life and its connections to wider aesthetic and political experiences of the 20th century. Black Surrealist is the foundational book on Ted Joans, a singularly important 20th-century figure.

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

Erscheint lt. Verlag	15.5.2025
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	140 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-7954-2 / 1501379542
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-7954-3 / 9781501379543
Zustand	Neuware