“I and not I”: Arab surrealism and its postcolonial afterlives

Abstract

This article examines two mid-century Arab surrealist movements–– al-Fann wa-l-hurriyya/Art et liberté in Egypt, and the circle of artists and writers orbiting the intellectual Urkhan Muyassar in Syria––and traces their respective influence on the later criticism of Edwar al-Kharrat and Adonis. For both groups, I argue, surrealism entailed a destabilization of the self that evoked the mystical underpinnings of Arab spiritual traditions, in particular Sufism. In the context of decolonization in the 1930s-1950s, this mystical unselving took on a political resonance: to destabilize your “I” meant becoming integrated into a larger “we.” This “we” was cosmopolitan; Syrian and Egyptian surrealists drew on the integrative force of mysticism to envision multi-ethnic and multi-faith national communities. For Adonis and al-Kharrat, writing in the 1980s and 90s, surrealism endures both as a method for recovering the latent modernism of Arabo-Islamic tradition, and for imagining a cosmopolitan political ideal.

Publisher

Routledge Journals

Publication Date

5-31-2026

Publication Title

Middle Eastern Literatures

Department

Comparative Literature

Additional Department

French and Italian

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2026.2631112

Keywords

Adonis, Edwar al-Kharrat, Surrealism, Sufism, Cosmopolitanism, Identity

Language

English

Format

text

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