The "Journal of Surrealism and the Americas" (JSA) at Arizona State University was one of the first multidisciplinary scholarly online-only journals dedicated to the surrealist diaspora and Indigenous responses to it. While new issues continue to be published on JSA’s website, the entire run of the journal is permanently archived in ASU Library’s KEEP institutional repository. The archive can be searched by issue, article, author or subject. Most importantly, JSA articles continue to be available open access and free of charge to interested readers.
The idea of an online journal began to take shape in 2004. In that year Claudia Mesch, an art history professor at Arizona State University, invited Samantha Kavky of Penn State to talk about her dissertation research as part of a colloquium, where they began to imagine a conference on the subject of surrealism and the American West. During the resulting conference in 2006 the "Journal of Surrealism and the Americas" was established. The first issue of the JSA appeared online in 2007. From its inception, JSA's editorial leaders were convinced that this journal should be open, available and free of charge to not only an academic audience, but to a wide public audience in the Southwest and beyond who held an interest in current research on the subject of surrealism in the Americas.
In its early years (2006-2010), the JSA was driven by its specialized conferences held at universities, supported by art foundations and attended by well-known national and international scholars from Mexico to France to Australia and beyond. The JSA has often narrowed the critical focus of individual issues to Latin America, a critical concern of the journal’s mission. From the start, however, the JSA and its editorial advisors were intent on casting the editorial net widely, and drawing on experts in the field to serve as guest editors of issues dealing with focused and/or marginalized research issues within the wider field, such as Native American surrealisms, transnational surrealisms, surrealist visions of resistance and revolution and women surrealists.
Our major commitment was to rethink a framework for surrealism that went beyond national boundaries, in order to recognize the wealth of art created across north, central and south Americas, and that continued to evolve and change surrealism in major ways during and since the immediate post-1945 period. The JSA has a continuing commitment to publishing essays important to surrealism studies in translation. For example, Kate Conley’s 2023 JSA special issue on the Hopi Notebook presents André Breton’s “‘Notebook From the Trip to Visit the Hopi Indians'” in English translation for the first time. The interview has emerged as a new format and forum for the JSA to explore major figures of our time with ties to surrealism. Art historian Abigail Susik (Willamette University) led the drive for the JSA to include these informal conversations in its issues. With these new and inclusive frameworks, formats and practices, the JSA connects to the spirit of open access and to the ASU Charter.
For the past eighteen years, the JSA has established itself as an international forum where the methods and disciplinary boundaries of art history and anthropology can be reexamined, where Eurocentric models of modernism are rethought and where debates about the transdisciplinary aspects of these disciplines can be played out. Our hope is that the journal will continue to impact surrealism studies by providing a truly interdisciplinary forum for new scholarship and by fostering debate concerning the legacy of the encounter of European intellectuals with the Indigenous cultures of the Americas. We are proud members of the ASU open access scholarly publishing community and continue our dedication to assure wide accessibility to the JSA as our readership continues to grow.
--Claudia Mesch, professor and founding editor of "Journal of Surrealism and the Americas"
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