This paper considers what anti-colonial surrealist praxis can provide those of us interested in the nexus of aesthetics and world politics. Thinking beyond the commonly held notion of surrealism as a European cultural movement, I engage with the writings of 20th-century anti-colonial surrealists, namely, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, and René Ménil. In doing so, I argue that anti-colonial surrealism is beyond a movement, a selection of methods, a genre or a set of ideas. Instead, I aim to position anti-colonial surrealist praxis as an epistemology that allows us to move beyond the limitations of representation, both by surfacing historical intimacies (rather than gaps) between content and form, while also questioning the demarcation between art and politics. I illustrate my argument’s resonance in the contemporary political moment through an engagement with aesthetic interventions produced by Sai, an artist exiled from contemporary Myanmar. Sai’s absurdist creative interventions and material drawn from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations allow me to demonstrate the political possibilities of an ‘anti-colonial surrealist praxis’ approach, in its conception of aesthetics as co-constitutive, rather than only representative, of the political.

Abul A‘la Maududi explicitly built on Islamic ideas of equality to critique nationalism and modern racism. How then could he reject the idea of social equality between men and women? This is particularly puzzling given his noticeable employment of a Marxist critique of the marketisation of society and liberal conceptions of freedom in his controversial 1939 book Pardah. Parsing out the structure of his argument in Pardah in some detail and emphasising the hitherto understudied engagement with Marxist ideas in his thought, this article shows that Maududi rejected a specific vision of social equality, where equality amounts to exchangeability. His use of Marxist ideas to non-Marxist ends was in large part a result of his assessment of Marx as a capable historian but a flawed philosopher, and more fundamentally a very different conception of society to the Marxist one. Maududi relied on his by then well-developed concept of divine sovereignty to carry much of the conceptual burden regarding his critique of, as well as alternatives to, social equality.