Andrea Gremels
Andrea Gremels is a researcher and lecturer of Francophone and Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Goethe University Frankfurt. She has published extensively on Caribbean and Latin American literature, film, and other media, as well as on transcultural studies, postcolonial theory, and international surrealism. She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) and a former Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Paris and Berlin. Her current research project focuses on the transnational connections of Surrealism between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. She received travel...
Wifredo Lam’s Transcultural Surrealism and the Haunting Memory of Enslavement in the Caribbean
The Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam was a central figure of transatlantic Surrealism in the first half of the twentieth century. This lecture explores the concept of transculturality at the core of his art, rooted in his African, European, and Chinese
descent as well as in his cosmopolitan biography and exchanges within the surrealist network linking Madrid, Paris, Havana, and the United States. I examine the transcultural surrealism of the paintings Lam created in the 1940s after returning to Cuba during World War II, focusing on his engagement with the symbolic worlds of Afro-Caribbean religious practices such as Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería. In particular, I consider how Lam’s transcultural art confronts the haunting memory of the transatlantic slave trade in the Caribbean and how his surrealist approach to this colonial trauma resonated among his contemporaries across the Americas. Finally, through his collaborative projects with Aimé Césaire and Joyce Mansour from the 1960s onward, the lecture shows how his work invites an understanding of surrealism’s “world arts” beyond the framework of national art and literary history.