The birds in question have archetypical significance as symbols of peace and war that connect to the history of colonialism. In their collaborative aesthetic recasting of these archetypal bird figures, I argue that both poet and painter symbolically take them over to take flight from conquest.
The inexact work of characterizing collaboration and a genealogy of influence necessarily relies greatly on speculation, on dreaming up connections in the space between the works, about the conceptual lives implied by the records, in dialogue with the works. In one of their understudied shared projects between text and image, I argue that their work pushes a Western structure of hierarchical and oppositional thought related to the history of conquest to its edge, or takes flight from conquest.
These works have been latent in my process of thinking through the values of conquest in contemporary discourse, including positive values associated with whiteness and negative values associated with darkness, and I fold that thinking process back into the research and writing of this essay 7. In their collaborative aesthetic recasting of these archetypal bird figures, I argue that both poet and painter take them over and demonstrate how to fly the mind out of conquest.
As the story goes, Breton found a copy of Tropiques in a bookstore in Fort-de-France, and he was so impressed by it, he arranged to meet the group behind the magazine through the bookshop owner 8.
His work of abstract imagery drawing on African aesthetic forms and rooted in Afro-Caribbean religiosity and Caribbean landscapes would become iconic in Cuba and beyond, and his paintings are currently held in many museums around the world. During the s he would also grow international recognition by publishing in literary magazines in New York, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Alexandria, and Havana.
