Race Traitor was a radical journal devoted to ultraleftist anti-white supremacist topics published in Massachusetts between 1993 and 2005. The journal’s mission as envisioned by founding co-editors John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev was to foster alliances and discourse related to a movement to abolish what they referred to as the social construction of the white race. Its motto, “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” was emblazoned on the cover of each issue. Of the sixteen issues of Race Traitor, two were special issues devoted to surrealism past and present edited by members of the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Chicago surrealist Franklin Rosemont guest-edited the first surrealist special issue of Race Traitor in the summer of 1998 (issue 9) and another member of the Chicago Group, Ron Sakolsky, edited a double issue in the summer of 2001 (issues 13 and 14). In addition, historical and contemporary texts by surrealists and a significant amount of other surrealist-related content appeared in various numbers of Race Traitor over the course of its twelve-year run.
These myriad surrealist contributions to Race Traitor exerted a powerful impact on the journal’s discourse and reception. However, to date, there has been no in-depth secondary consideration of the significance of the surrealist participation in Race Traitor in scholarly literature devoted to surrealism. Meanwhile, in the limited secondary literature devoted to Race Traitor by scholars from various disciplines, there has been even less attention granted to the journal’s connections to contemporary surrealism. This is perhaps an unsurprising state of affairs given what would superficially appear to be the tangential relationship of surrealism to the revolutionary abolitionism of Race Traitor. Yet, the historical, theoretical, and cultural ties between contemporary surrealism and Race Traitor run deep, and their elucidation possesses enormous potential to sharpen our critical understanding of surrealist anti-racism past and present. This lecture analyzes the key role that contemporary surrealists and surrealist cultural strategies played in Race Traitor since its inception by founding co-editor, Noel Ignatiev, starting in 1992.
Abigail Susik is Joint Editor of Bloomsbury’s Transnational Surrealism Series and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021). She is the editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-1967 (Eberhardt, 2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester UP, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State UP, 2022). Two books are forthcoming in 2024/25: her anthology, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture 1965-2008, by Franklin Rosemont (PM Press); and her volume Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present (Bloomsbury). Susik is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University in Oregon, and a founding Board Member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.
Organised by Professor Gavin Parkinson (Professor in European Modernism, The Courtauld) as part of the 2024-25 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘A Century of Surrealism: Resistance and the Image Since the Manifesto of Surrealism’.
