From A Nation Torn

Decolonizing
Art and
Representation
in France,
1945–1962

Hannah Feldman
From A nATIon Torn
oBJeCTs / hIsTorIes: Critical Perspectives
on Art, material Culture, and representation

A SERIES EDITED BY NICHOLAS THOMAS

Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation.

From A nATIon Torn
Decolonizing Art and Representation
in France, 1945–1962
Hannah Feldman

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and Trade Gothic
by BW&A Books, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Hannah.
From a nation torn : decolonizing art and representation in France, 1945–1962 /
Hannah Feldman.
pages cm. —  (Objects/Histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5356-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5371-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Art—Political aspects—France—History—20th century. 
2. Art and state—France—History—20th century. 
3. Decolonization—Social aspects—France—History—20th century.
I. Title.  II. Series: Objects/histories.
n72.p6f45 2014
709.44'09045—dc23
2013042836

This book was made possible by a collaborative grant

from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
 To the family
that sustained me
throughout the writing
of this book—
Jorge, Lola, and Addie.
Thank you.
 Contents

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation  1

I Fragments and faÇades: André Malraux and the Image of the Past
as the Future of the Present 
1 Fragments; or, The Ends of Photography  19
2 Façades; or, The Space of Silence  41

II Between Resistance and Refusal: The Language of Art and Its Publics 
Sonic
3  Youth, Sonic Space: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of
Deterritorialization  77
4 La France Déchirée: The Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between  109

III Reidentifications: Seeing Citizens Being Seen 

“The
5  Eye of History”: Photojournalism, Protest, and the Manifestation
of 17 October 1961  159
6 Looking Past the State of Emergency: A Coda  201
Notes  221
Bibliography  271
Index  305
 Illustrations

1.1  Maurice Jarnoux, photograph, André Malraux, published in Paris Match, 1950  20
2.1  Unknown photographer, Hôtel de la Fare, 14 place Vendôme, Paris, 1962  47
2.2  Unknown artist, “Range of old Moorish Buildings at Algiers to be pulled down to
make room for the Boulevard de l’Impératrice,” 1861  56
2.3  Unknown photographer, album photograph of French Cavalry on the Boulevard
de la République, Algiers, 1880s  57
2.4–2.6  Julien Duvivier (dir.), film stills from Pépé le Moko, 1937  59
2.7–2.10  Gillo Pontecorvo (dir.), film stills from Battle of Algiers, 1966  60–61
2.11  L’atelier
Parisienne d’Urbanisme, Map showing secteurs sauvegardés generated by
the Malraux law in relation to the historic walls of Paris  64
2.12 and 2.13 
Unknown photographer, Église Saint Gervais before and after the imple-
mentation of the loi Malraux, 1957 and 1983  66–67
2.14  Louis Arretche, Paul Vitry, Michel Marot, and Maurice Minost, Plan de
sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais (psmv ), 1965  72–73
2.15  Plate 11, Plan de Turgot, engraving, 1739  73
3.1  Isidore
Isou, flow chart, “Schèma II: L’évolution du matériel poétique,”
Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, 1947  83
3.2–3.7  Isidore Isou, film stills, Traité de bave et d’ éternité, 1951  88–89, 92, 95
3.8  Isidore Isou, poésie graphique, “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés,” 1947  96
3.9  Gabriel Pomerand, page from the artist’s book Saint ghetto des prêts, 1950  100
3.10  Maurice Lemaître, page from Canailles, 1950  101
4.1  Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Graffiti, circa 1935–1950  110
4.2  Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, décollage, Ach Alma Manetro, 1949  111
4.3  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains near a sign that
states “Défense d’afficher,” rue Laplace, Paris, 1961  112
ix
 4.4  Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, photogram of unfinished film, Défense
illustr ations

d’afficher—Loi du 29 juillet 1881, 1950  114

4.5  Raymond Hains, La palissade des emplacements réservés, as installed in the “Salle
des Informels” at the first Paris Biennale, 1959  117
4.6 and 4.7 
Raymond Hains, La palissade à de Feugas, Manifeste du 3 octobre 59 et la
poubelle de l’ école des Beaux Arts de Blois, 1959–1996  118
4.8  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains with L’entremets de
la palissade de Raymond Hains, 1960  120
4.9  Gilles Raysse, photograph, Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Réalisme,
1961  121
4.10 and 4.11  Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, details, Hépérile éclaté, 1953  122
4.12–4.14  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photographs, Raymond Hains on the street
with political graffiti, 1961  124–125
4.15  HarryShunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains in his apartment
at 26 rue Delambre, Paris, 1961  127
4.16  Raymond Hains, décollage, Cet homme est dangereux, 1957   129
4.17  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains, Cet homme est
dangereux, 1957, as installed at the opening of La France déchirée, 1961  129
4.18 and 4.19 
Galerie Colette Allendy, cover and inside, invitation to Photographies
hypnagogiques, an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains, 1947  132
4.20  Raymond Hains, gelatin-silver print, Chimère d’Arezzo, 1947  133
4.21  Raymond Hains, gelatin-silver print, Le conquérant, 1947  133
4.22  Raymond Hains, décollage, Paix en Algérie, 1956  135
4.23  Unknown graphic artist, poster advocating a “oui” vote in the constitutional
referendum of 28 September 1958  136
4.24  Unknown graphic artist, poster advocating a “oui” vote in the referendum of
8 January 1961, concerning Algerian auto-determination  137
4.25  Agence-France Presse (Afp), photograph, Charles de Gaulle with his arms raised
in a “V” for “victory,” Constantine (Qusantînah), 4 June 1958  137
4.26  Raymond Hains, décollage, C’est ça le rénouveau?, 1959  145
4.27 and 4.28  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photographs, Raymond Hains on the
street with political graffiti, 1961  147, 149
4.29  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, pedestrians and onlookers outside
Galerie J during the opening of La France déchirée, 1961  151
4.30  Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, gallery-owner Janine Restany
installing a work by Jacques Villeglé in the exhibition La France déchirée, Galerie J,
Paris, 1961  152

x
4.31  HarryShunk and János Kender, photograph, onlookers at the opening of the

illustr ations
exhibition La France déchirée, 1961  153
5.1  Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marché Neuf commemorating
Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961, 2011  161
5.2  JeanTexier, photograph, graffiti on the Quai de Conti, November 1961: “Ici on
noie les Algériens” (Here we drown Algerians)  162
5.3  France-Soir,
map of the Algerians’ points of departure into Paris for the
demonstration of 17 October 1961, published 19 October 1961  172
5.4  Unknown photographer, the Algerian demonstration of 17 October 1961  174
5.5  Gustave
Caillebotte, oil on canvas, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Art Institute of
Chicago  176
5.6  Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Boulevard des Italiens, 1933  176
5.7  Brassaï(Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Les grands boulevards, pedestrians in
front of a poster for the film “Le Diable au Corps,” circa 1947  177
5.8  Unknown photographer, demonstrators in front of the cinéma Berlitz,
17 October 1961  178
5.9  Gaston Paris, photograph, Le cinéma Berlitz, 1955  181
5.10  Roger Berson, photograph, Le Palais Berlitz, showing the exhibition poster for
Le Juif et la France, 1941  182
5.11 and 5.12  Roger Berson, installation views, Le Juif et la France, 1941  183
5.13  Unknown photographer, cover of Paris Match, “Nuit de troubles à Paris,”
published 28 October 1961  187
5.14–5.17  RaymondDarolle and Gérard Ménager, photographs documenting
the Algerian demonstration of 17 October 1961, as printed in Paris Match,
28 October 1961  188–191
5.18  Elie Kagan, photograph, Abdelkader Bennehar, Algerian demonstrator, injured
and on the ground, Nanterre, 1961  194
5.19  Elie
Kagan, photograph, arrested demonstrators, Paris, Métro Place de la
Con­corde, 17 October 1961  196
5.20  René-Jacques, photograph, Place de la Concorde, circa 1955  198
6.1  Dennis Adams, installation detail, The Algerian Annex, 1989   203
6.2–6.5  Michael Haneke (dir.), film stills from Caché, 2005  206–208
6.6  Jean-François
Deroubaix, photograph, “Fifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois
(Seine-Saint-Denis),” 31 October 2005  212
6.7  Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs.), video still, Europa 2005–27 Octobre,
2006  216

xi
 Acknowledgments

For as long as I have been working on this book—which feels like as long as I can
remember—I have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that will
preface it. The gratitude I feel to the many friends, family members, colleagues, and
students who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way or
another has long both moved and motivated me, and I am honored finally to render
my thanks publicly. They may be small recompense for what some of the individu-
als below have done for me and for this book, but they are heartfelt and profound all
the same.
The research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support
from a number of institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Trust, which funded a
crucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, and Northwestern
University/The Graduate School, which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant. At
Northwestern, I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-
ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute for
the Humanities. Doctoral grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Mellon
Foundation, the Ambassade de France aux États-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand), and
the SPFFA (Bourse Marandon) provided essential support for early research forays.
Researching this book took me frequently to France, where I am grateful to ar-
chivists, librarians, and specialists at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF),
the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Institut national
de l’audiovisuel (INA), the Bibliothèque documentaire internationale contemporaine
(BDIC), the Musée de l’histoire contemporaine, the Musée d’art modern de la Ville
de Paris, the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris, and the Keystone-Eyedea
archives. Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois, Eric Mircher, and Alain
Cueff allowed me access to their archives, and I remain grateful for their generous
assistance. In New York, access to documents and images at the Museum of Modern
Art and at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation certainly benefited this publication. Last
but not least, Dennis Adams—a phenomenal artist, but also an archivist in his own

xiii
 fashion—deserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-
acknowledgments

tails regarding his own work, but illuminating insights into the issues that underlie
our mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization.
Versions of the arguments about décollage presented in chapter 4 have been pub-
lished as “Of the Public Born: Raymond Hains and La France déchirée” in October
108 (2004), 73–96; and as “Words, Actions, Inactions, and Things: Reality Between
La Résistance and L’ insoumission,” in New Realisms, edited by Julia Robinson (Madrid:
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010),
41–52. Thanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publication.
Components of the arguments I make in chapter 5 have been published in “Flash For-
ward: Pictures at War,” which was published in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays
on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Re-
search Institute, 2013), 153–170. I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan
as well as Laura Santiago for their important suggestions regarding that essay, many
of which have migrated into these pages as well. Materials from this book have been
presented at a variety of talks and conference papers over the years, and I am grate-
ful to my audiences for having so carefully engaged my arguments. Whether or not
they remember, a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at these
fora, and I wish to thank them here: André Dombrowski, Josh Cole, Gregg Bordo­
witz, Josh Shannon, Dan Wang, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby,
Saloni Mathur, Rebecca Zorach, Nasser Rabat, Chris Pinney, and Anne Wagner. My
gratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-
lived writing group that included Terri Weisman, Meredith Davis, Jason Weems, and
Hérica Valladares.
Whatever form it has taken now, the seeds of this book were planted in my brain
during my years as a PhD candidate at Columbia University. I warmly thank my for-
mer advisors Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh as well as Jonathan Crary and
Barry Bergdoll for having provided me with the tools—not to mention the will!—
necessary to think about vision, space, and art in the particular ways that I try to in
these pages. Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officially,
Rosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertation
that sparked this book, and I am grateful for her ongoing interest in the work, as her
own writing has been a source of constant inspiration for me.
No matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia, I must also say
that the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends and
colleagues, including especially George Baker, TJ Demos, Roger Rothman, Margaret
Sundell, Candice Breitz, Stephanie Schwartz, and Nicoletta Leonardi. A dear friend
and an essential interlocutor since graduate school, Rachel Haidu deserves all my
gratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-
ings she has given its many iterations. The strengths of my argument are due to her
incisive intelligence. The weaknesses, of course, remain my own. Claire Gilman has
also, since the beginning, been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally.

xiv
 Since arriving at Northwestern, I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-

acknowledgments
ing intellectual project that animates my department’s commitment to art historical
study. I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable, both
in art history and across campus, especially in the Programs in Comparative Literary
Study and Middle Eastern and North African Studies, with which I am also affili-
ated. For their key support, several colleagues deserve special mention. Holly Clayson
has been a true friend, a tremendous interlocutor, and a very patient mentor-model.
She has also made me laugh more times than I can remember, and deserves extra
thanks for that. Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a better
and more careful thinker for years, and I thank him for his enduring faith in my ca-
pacities. Christina Kiaer and David Van Zanten also merit special thanks for their
encouragement and support, and Christina as well for her important friendship since
we both arrived at Northwestern in the same year. My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)
Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, and, for a joyous three years, Cecily Hilsdale,
made going to work as fun as it was also intellectually stimulating. For their friend-
ship, which has sustained me as much as their scholarship has provided me with mod-
els from which to learn, I thank them endlessly. Thanks as well to Jesús Escobar, Ann
Gunter, Rob Linrothe, Claudia Swan, Christina Normore, Sarah Fraser, and Hamid
Naficy, who counts as one of us, too. Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-
raway, Bonnie Honig, Sam Weber, Domietta Torlasco, Brian Edwards, Josef Barton,
Peter Hayes, Laura Hein, Kelly Kaczynski, Lane Relyea, Dylan Penningroth, Jessica
Winegar, Rebecca Johnson, Robert Harriman, Emily Maguire, and Dilip Gaonkar
have also been important to the ideas articulated here.
At Northwestern, I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressive
students and advisees, and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributions
to this work as well as reasons to keep doing it. I am pleased to thank especially Lily
Woodruff, Chad Elias, Jennifer Cazenave, Madelaine Eulich, Angelina Lucento, Ali-
son Fisher, Min Lee, David Calder, Emma Chubb, Faye Gleisser, Brynn Hatton, Erin
Reitz, and Rory Sykes. Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee, and I will
always miss her keen intellect and great humor.
This book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicated
people at Duke University Press, and many thanks are due the incredibly patient
and supportive editorial team there. I am especially grateful to Ken Wissoker for his
calm, gentle prodding, and for his long-standing interest in this project, and to Jade
Brooks for her expert advice and help over the years. Although I understand little of
how it works, I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundation–funded Art
History Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support AHPI has pro-
vided this book. The anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscript
provided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript. I hope they
will see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and points
of interest. Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-
quently over-burdened sentences, and both Chris Crochetière and Barbara Williams

xv
 at BW&A Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-
acknowledgments

duction of this book. Over the years, I was the beneficiary of much excellent research
assistance, but Max Allison, Hannah Green, and Luke Fidler merit special mention.
Luke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout the
final stages of readying the book for production and publication.
Conversations with friends and colleagues—whether about the arguments in
this book or not—over the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-
ably and improved my life exponentially. I owe my gratitude to more people than
I can certainly name here. Nonetheless, I will try. In no particular order, Rachel
Haidu (again), Judith Rodenbeck, Cecily Hilsdale, Nell Andrew, Lyle Massey, Julia
Bryan Wilson, TJ Demos, Paul Jaskot, Keith Topper, Darby English, Carrie Lam-
bert Beatty, Noit Banai, Hannah Higgins, Kader Attia, Terry Smith, Carol Duncan,
Steven Nelson, Iftikhar Dadi, Andrew Hemingway, Liz Kotz, Thierry de Duve, Ali
Behdad, Tony Cokes, Esra Akcan, Mary Roberts, Caro­lin Behrmann, Ann Marie
Yasin, Michael Rakowitz, Devon Fore, Lori Waxman, Adam Lehner, Janet Kraynak,
Tanya Simon, Julia Meltzer, David Thorne, Nathalie Bouzaglo, Jon Sachs, Stephanie
Smith, Miguel Amat, Liz Mermin, Linda Rattner, Jessie Labov, Stephanie Freedman,
Darrell Halverson, and Kevin Bell: thank you all. Each of you helped at pivotal mo-
ments and in essential ways. Elliot Reichert also deserves more than a note of thanks
here, not only for his early help with various research matters, but for the long and
rewarding conversations on these and other, more important topics that we have de-
veloped since.
I am profoundly grateful to my family, and especially the loving women who sup-
ported me and endured my disappearances through the many years of writing this
book. Thanks especially to my mother, Linda Lowell, for her unrelenting faith and
constant strength, and also to Bayla Kraft and Nancy Urruchi for their care. Jackie
Allen, Barry Feldman, Alcides Coronado, and Eva Oviedo have also all helped. My
beautiful and brilliant nieces, Sofia and Eleanor McDermott, also deserve thanks
for all that they have taught me and all the reasons—flying pigs and others, too—
they have given me to hope. Thanks to their parents, Nancy Coronado and James
McDermott, as well as to my own aunt and uncle, Rona and Allen Goodman.
Finally, and most important, during most of the many, many years that this book
was researched, written, revised, and revised again, I was lucky enough to enjoy the
constant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures, human and canine.
Their love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence, al-
beit in different ways. To the bullies, Lola and Adelaide, and to their human, Jorge, I
offer my greatest thanks. I could not have done this without them, nor would I have
wanted to. I dedicate this book to them, and to the great memory of our small and
strange family, even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk, Lola a Kong
toss, and Jorge so much more, still.
—HF

xvi
 Introduction:
Art during War and the Potentialities
of Decolonial Representation

DÉCHIREMENT/LACERATION (cruel, painful).—­This term helps accredit the notion of

History’s irresponsibility. The state of war is masked under the noble garment of tragedy,
as if the conflict were essentially Evil, and not a (remediable) evil. Colonization evaporates,
engulfed in the halo of an impotent lament, which recognizes the misfortune in order to
establish it only the more successfully.

GUERRE/ WAR.—­The goal is to deny the thing. For this, two means are available: either
to name it as little as possible (most frequent procedure); or else to give it the meaning of
its contrary (more cunning procedure, which is at the basis of almost all the mystifications
of bourgeois discourse).

—­Roland Barthes, “African Grammar,” The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, 1957

T
his is a book about war, although it will make no reference to specific battles, or
really anything of much military concern. Instead, it is a book that proposes to
consider the ways in which the experience of war motivates the production and
justification of culture, as well as why we have been unable to see this effect. It focuses
on the development and deployment of aesthetic practices and theories in France from
the late 1940s throughout the 1960s, a place and a period about which we already as-
sume we know a great deal. This assumption notwithstanding, the impetus to write
about the specific intersections of spatial and visual culture during this period arises
from a simple fact: whereas the field of modern European art history circumscribes
these decades as being “post-­war,” their reality was anything but, especially in France.
Indeed, it was during these decades that France fought the longest wars of the twen-
tieth century, wars that were, not coincidentally for the arguments I make in these

1
 pages, intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire. It follows that the art of this
introduction

period is not “post-­war” as we have come to understand it. Instead, it is an art that
was created within, shaped by, and fully legible only in the historical context of an
ongoing war—­or wars, as the case may be. It is, therefore, art we need to understand
as “art during-­war.” In focusing on this distinction, this book aims to understand the
specific and historical ways in which the art and visual culture of this time were sit-
uated as essential and elaborate components of a feedback loop that taught people to
see not only the art made during their time but to understand the spaces—­material
and discursive—­in which it circulated, or from whence it drew.1 My object of study
therefore includes not only art objects proper (and improper, as suggested below), but
also the ways in which and the places where art itself was positioned to engage, if not
also construct, the audience with or for whom it would attempt to generate meaning.
More than a question of simple semantics, this transition from “post” to “during”
is significant not only for the comprehensiveness of how we understand the mid-­
twentieth century and the kinds of claims that were made by and for art at that time,
but also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history
more generally. Over the course of this book’s exposition, I suggest that the periodi­
zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the “post” that pre-
cedes references to the Second World War as a generic “war” in the term “post-­war”
has had the unintended effect of naturalizing our historical remove from this moment
to the point of calcification and of fixing the geographic certainty that places the
former Western Europe at the center of the period’s cultural production. The conse-
quences of such reification are far more significant than a matter of dating or chart-
ing aesthetic developments and transactions across the disruptive event that we have
always understood war to be, and for good reasons.
As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above, the linguistic strat-
egy that motivates—­or motivated in 1957—­the representation of war works either to
deny it categorically or to obfuscate it by asserting it as its own opposite. In this way,
war becomes “pacification,” and “déchirement,” the tearing apart of a people that it
produces, is marked as a lamentable but unavoidable fact of history. When Barthes
indicts this phenomenon as the operational logic behind most bourgeois mystifica-
tions, he offers us the tool to similarly undermine the equally “cunning” chronologi­
cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war, the “during,” and
indeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account
of “writing the disaster,” with the retrospective finality of “post.” 2 Despite his cau-
tion, however, the historical categorization of “post-­war” has managed to absorb and
so naturalize once again the rhetoric—­Barthes’s allusion is specifically to the state’s
rhetoric—­that meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-
ing “at” war into a time marked by being “after” war.
For art historians of the “post-­war” period, interpreting art practices and works
in exclusive reference to the major axis of the Second World War has meant, first and
foremost, distancing ourselves and the objects of our study from other contemporane-

2
ous histories. Among these, this book is principally concerned with the crucial points

introduction
of ideological intersection and overlap between the moment of French reconstruction
after the Second World War, the consolidation of an emergent Europe, and, most
significantly, decolonization and the wars fought to achieve it in much of Africa and
Asia from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, or what I will hereafter refer to as
the decades of decolonization. Having distanced ourselves and our objects from the
complications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to
be “post” means that we have not fully seen the complete picture, either as it pertains
to the interconnectedness of the episodes of state violence that marked this period or
as it pertains to the debates about aesthetic practice and representation that forcibly
accompanied them. While it is true that twentieth-­century art history as a discipline
has done little to acknowledge the claims of the colonized that emerged with urgent
immediacy and with heightened visibility during these decades, it is also true that
the field has been impaired in doing so because we have not seen the carefully con-
structed articulations of visuality that were developed to alternately frame and ob-
scure these claims.3 In the long term, this situation has also meant that we have not
always registered the impact that these articulations have had on charting visual prac-
tice, both in the geopolitical centers of empire and the cultures that developed there.
But that point is beyond the parameters of this Introduction.
In 1957, when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres
nouvelles—­essays that would later form his Mythologies—­France was embroiled in a
significant war, even if, at that time, the official parlance to which Barthes alludes
did not name it as such.4 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we
view the French mid-­century from one preoccupied with the condition of being “af-
ter” to one attentive to the conditions of existence “during,” it is helpful to recall a
few historical facts that similarly reframe the decades in question. In particular, it
is instructive to remember that the uprisings that would eventually culminate in
the 1954–1962 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 1945, precisely on
8 May, a date much better celebrated in Western histories as “Victory in Europe Day”
(VE Day), as the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied Powers came to be called at
the time. So, just as one moment of violence and genocide was ending and precisely as
it was being celebrated with pageantry and parade, another episode in what the his-
torian Abdelmajid Hannoum has recently coined a “violent modernity” was begin-
ning. Rather than discontinuous and contained, the history of war in France during
the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual.5
The centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War
of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-­enactment of the Sétif uprisings
in Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la loi (Outside the Law, 2010). As Bouchareb’s film shows
with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-
ductions that mimic them, on 8 May 1945 several thousand Algerians, many of whom
had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in
uniform, amassed in Sétif to join the VE Day celebrations that were taking place on

3
 the streets of cities and towns across Algeria in much the same fashion as across met-
introduction

ropolitan France.6 In Algeria, however, local colonial authorities only allowed Alge-
rian participation in these celebrations on the condition that those assembled refrain
from articulating any overt political platforms. When, instead, several people among
the thousands assembled began chanting demands that the anti-­colonialist leader,
Messali Hadj, be freed from arrest in France, and calling for what Ferhat Abbas’s
Manifeste du peuple algérien (1943) insisted be an “Algérie libre et indépendante,” the
colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 26-­year-­old man carrying a
green banner with a red star and a crescent moon, symbols of Algerian nationalism
that would eventually constitute the Algerian flag.
Violence broke out between the protestors and the police, and spread quickly to
produce a generalized clash between native Algerians and European settlers that left
approximately one hundred European settlers dead. In response, General Charles de
Gaulle, then provisional leader of the French government and its future president,
authorized the army—­including militias stationed in nearby Guelma, foreign legion
troops, and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oran—­to
intervene and restore peace. The military assault subsequently launched against the
people of Sétif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming
that, in February 2005, the French ambassador to Algeria, Hubert Colin de Verdière,
was forced to acknowledge it as a “massacre” in which, according to historians’ es-
timates, approximately 8,000 Algerians died (although this number, according to
some accounts, represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead).7 The
stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact
that when Bouchareb’s film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, riot police
had to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-
stood as the film’s biased and prejudicial account of the events in Sétif.
For the purposes at hand, then, what happened in Sétif underscores the fact that,
at the same time Europe was celebrating its liberation from Fascism and the end of
six years of devasting war, French forces were already being redeployed, this time
against—­and not in defense of—­a population that was also ostensibly governed un-
der France’s authority and flag, even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the
rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry. Shortly after the Sétif massacre, French forces
would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches of
their empire in the First Indochinese War, or what is sometimes called the French-­
Vietnamese War (1946–1954). The brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at
Dien Bien Phu in May 1954—­significantly, for France and its militaries, the same
year the Algerian War of Independence officially began—­marked not the end of a
single war so much as the consolidation of a pattern of intervention that the French
would come to repeat again and again in the series of wars, conflicts, and skirmishes
in which they engaged, in order to maintain an empire that, before the Second World
War, had been second in size only to that of Great Britain.
The official declaration of the Algerians’ militarized demands for independence

4
would not come until 1 November 1954, even though these demands had been long in

introduction
the making.8 The Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 1954 un-
til 1962, not only between the French army and the Algerian Armée de libération na­
tionale (ALN) and Front de libération nationale (FLN), but also among factions of rival
Algerian nationalists in both France and Algeria, and eventually between the French
government and the organized paramilitary of right-­wing opponents to Algerian in-
dependence led by French far-­right Army generals who called themselves the Organi­
sation de l’armée secrète (OAS). The scope of such a war can only be properly grasped
in terms of the many kinds of conflicts, armed and otherwise, that comprised it. Cul-
ture, as this book argues, figured chief among these conflicts. Along with its political
and historical significance, however, such a culture tends to wither in the histories
based on, if not actually constructed by the term “post-­war.” Thus, this book turns to
the possibilities of how this culture might have been seen otherwise in order to inves-
tigate how we might better re-­see it now.
In this introductory chapter, I focus on the immediate origins of the Algerian
War of Independence, not because I want to suggest that they were the most impor­
tant events of the thirty-­year period under analysis in this book (although for some
this is certainly the case). Rather, the Algerian War of Independence is of signal im-
portance for this study of decades previously thought to be “post-­war” because it es-
tablishes the contest between the French state as a false guarantor of rights and the
significance of the claims made by those anxious to achieve their rights as sovereign
political subjects, in excess of the statist provisions that have been so central to analy­
ses of subalternity within colonial modernity. The Algerian War of Independence is
also pivotal as a litmus test for the state’s imposition of the law as a means to deny—­
rather then ensure—­such claims, and therefore also a key moment in the essential
turn to extra-­juridical means to implement and develop political invisibility. For the
story that transpires during the decades of decolonization analyzed here, the art they
occasioned, and how this art was deeply if inversely tied to debates about political
representation, it is critical that these extra-­juridical means often focused on the in-
stitutions that comprised the public sphere and the sites that comprised urban pub-
lic space.
Indeed, it was on 3 April 1955, almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-
dependence by the FLN, that the French National Assembly voted to approve a law
that would allow for the declaration of a “state of emergency.” This law allowed the
government to censor or otherwise limit and control all the institutions of the public
sphere, including the press, and also curtail or restrict public assembly. Such measures
were further augmented by the decree of “Special Powers” in 1956, which not only
enabled greater restriction of expression, but also prepared for the violation of hu-
man rights, such that internment camps and torture centers became logical and legal
tools of the French wars to maintain the empire, just as they had been such impor­
tant components of the National Revolution in Nazi Germany. Ultimately and rather
famously, factions of the French military attempted a coup in Algiers on 13 May

5
 1958, in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom
introduction

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropole’s vacillation regarding the
maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of France’s geopo-
litical territory. This failed coup led to the collapse of the metropolitan government
and, with it, the Fourth Republic. For France, such a collapse triggered an impor­tant
shift in the configuration of governmental responsibilities of republicanism vis-­à-­vis
the populations that the state was meant to “represent” and whose interests it was
meant to serve. Along with this transformation, which was most immediately visible
in the enhanced authority assigned to the president as elected sovereign, the problem
of representing the past and the present as a means to envision and enact a future be-
came central components of reestablishing French hegemony. Culture, in turn, would
become a primary locus of this effort, as well.
This book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-
tatory device and culture as normalizing control meet—­literally, in the physical space
of Paris. It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range of
French visual practices during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in light of the challenges
that decolonization wrought on theories of representation, both political and picto-
rial, and the tacit implications that decolonization would have for official as well as
unsanctioned French remembrances of the recent past, public. While decolonization
and colonial remembrance are significantly opposite in their intent, it might none-
theless be said that they share a significant structural similarity at their core; indeed,
each is organized around the ambition to shape and determine (at least in the short
run) a national public. In this instance, the decolonizing processes that were set in
motion by the events in Sétif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independence
necessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-
ties of public belonging that the war introduced. This was especially true in the way
these modalities would be articulated in regard to the consolidation of memories sur-
rounding the recent experience of the Second World War. By asserting the centrality
that the Algerian War of Independence had on visual culture and the public experi-
ences that it would enable within the boundaries of metropolitan France, my analysis
here intends to highlight the significance of subaltern political agendas on establish-
ing modern French visual and spatial culture. It does so with an eye to looking both
forward and backward, so that we see the importance of these agendas in the early
moments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been
achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies). This expanded history also
means keeping the experiences of the 1940s—­war, genocide, and occupation chief
among them—­in view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would
come to be represented in later decades. These experiences also reflected how defini-
tions of national belonging would be forcefully articulated in relation to a long his-
tory of French universalist republicanism, understood at the time as having been
sullied first (or worse, only) by the ideological interruption of the Vichy regime, when
the French government colluded with the German occupation of their own country.
In the context of the arguments that follow, and in light of this expanded histori­

6
cal view of what we might call the “long 1950s,” I should clarify that in the above

introduction
allusion to “subaltern political agendas,” I mean to invoke both those of the colo-
nized populations of French empire—­in this case mostly Algerians—­as well as those
among the French populace who were equally interpellated and shaped by a domi-
nant French cultural project that attempted to represent their experience on their be-
half. My use of the term “subaltern” therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha in
his essay, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Guha uses the
term to designate the broadest category of people who are defined in distinction to,
but not dependent upon, the official governmental, economic, and juridical authority
ascribed to the “elite.” 9 For Guha, one of the most important aspects of this term is
that it establishes a category that is relational and always constructed in negotiation
with shifting platforms of power. Within the narrative that this book charts, there-
fore, the Ashkenazi Jews living in Paris were certainly subaltern in their relationship
to the state’s articulation of public memory in the mid-1940s, even though they also
maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations, and even
as their experiences have now come to occupy an emphatically central place in dom-
inant historical (and art-­historical) narratives. Because, however, the principal con-
cern of this book is with representation—­both political and pictorial, so to speak—­it
also bears emphasizing that my investments in the political agendas of the subaltern
classes is not that of a historian or even of a sociologist, although I draw on work in
both areas of expertise. My aim, nonetheless, is not to expose or identify the produc-
tion of specific identitarian agencies heretofore unseen.
Rather, following important advances made by Dipesh Chakrabarty and more
recently by Achille Mbembe, I hope to lay the groundwork necessary to explain how
such elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories
of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they depend.10 “Provincial-
izing France,” as Mbembe and Chakrabarty would have it, means seeing it again:
seeing it as it was and as it labored to picture itself during a history we have other-
wise allowed to become myth—­according to the logic of Barthes’s analysis—­as well
as seeing it with or alongside the history of its colonial past and in concert with the
place of its colonial interventions. As Chakrabarty inveighs, such a project means
writing a “history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its nar-
rative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion
with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state
all other possibilities of human solidarity.” 11
While popular and scholarly narratives of modern art, modern aesthetics, modern
literature, and even modern urbanism have long taken France and its capital as their
central example—­with good reason, given the ideological articulation of French state-
craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions
of modern subjectivity—­my interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge
significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured
over the past fifty years.12 Following Chakrabarty’s challenge to “make visible” the
collusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand,

7
 I should emphasize that this study has no interest in dislodging French cultural pro-
introduction

duction from the central position it enjoys in the historiography of modernity. Rather,
it intends, as Mbembe instructs, reimagining this history as transnational, as equally
rooted in the experiences of the colonies as it is in those of the metropole. Doing so
means redefining what France means in order to expand the purviews of how we un-
derstand the modern that issues from it without compromising the complex realities
of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of
“alternative” modernities somewhat utopian. Indeed, the integrity of the French na-
tion as equivalent to the “hexagon” that is defined by its physical borders has already
been persistently challenged by the interests and claims articulated by those excluded
from the categories of belonging that France, like other nation-states, has developed
in accordance with the self-­interest of modern democracy and its adherence to the
contradictory principles of collective consensus and liberal individualism. Some of
those challenges make my point: that the history of French art and visual culture has
also always been the history of Algerian art and visual culture.
Here, too, a second clarification is helpful and important, because I do not pro-
pose to rewrite French art as Algerian art. While this might be an interesting project,
it actually runs counter to the methodological stakes of the arguments I am making
here, which focus instead on the complex relationship between national productions
and thus on the forces that come to negotiate, represent, and constitute such cultural
nationalisms. These, in part, are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he
insists we now recognize that “every nation is now transnational and diasporic. The
crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders
as inside. The distant, the elsewhere, and the here-­at-­home meet.” 13 While the proj-
ect of creating a more inclusive canon of modernism by incorporating art made by
Algerians alongside their European counterparts exceeds my study, it is certainly
work that other scholars can and should undertake. This is also true of recuperating
the women who, as artists and activists, labored alongside the men described here.
What this book intends to do, in place of such recuperative or corrective projects, is
to understand France through the fundamental tears and contradictions at the heart
of empire, just as it proposes to understand culture, regardless of whether it is at-
tributed to an “Algerian” maker or a “French” one, as also always subject to the trans-
national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced by
it. As much as France is the target of this book’s analysis, then, so too is the model
of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-­state’s repre-
sentation of itself that has allowed us to imagine something like a hexagonal France
in the first place.
In the chapters that follow, I contend that the visibility and invisibility of various
populations, subaltern or otherwise—­French, Algerian, pied-­noir, Jewish—­within
the geopolitical entities formed and re-­formed by the shifting borders and allegiances
forged after the end of the Second World War, indeed “after Sétif,” were the result of
actions and agents that, until now, we have not been able to see within the purview

8
of art and visual cultural analyses of the period. These actions cannot be dislodged

introduction
from their ideological embeddedness in the Europeanization that began in earnest
with the establishment of the European Common Market, and in response to the as-
sertion of American military and moral hegemony against the threat of global com-
munism. But it was also during this time that Western nations began to increase the
stakes of their engagement in the conflicts regarding those territories that had been
divvied up after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, thereby establishing the new pa-
rameters of an emergent global politics concentrated on the particularity of a given
place. Of particular interest to this study is how these historical elements influenced
the articulation of the very same aesthetic and urban models that we have since come
to naturalize and rationalize as self-­evidently modern. The impact that such simulta-
neously temporal and spatial contests for self-­representation had on the production
of cultural meaning cannot be underestimated. And, in order to understand them
more fully, we need to historicize what has long motivated the very impulse not to ac-
knowledge them as significant. For art historians, taking up this double perspective
allows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualize—that is,
fundamentally reinterpret—the assumptions about abstraction and figuration, spec-
tacle and reality, speech and text, politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-
occupation with this period.
To begin with the most basic question: what were the mechanics by which
those unacknowledged within ascendant discursive enterprises effected images of
themselves or otherwise attempted to represent their own experience? In accessing
what the political theorist Hannah Arendt would generalize as the “public space of
appearance”—­and which she, like the other figures in this book’s analysis, abandons
to the world of men—­such subjects challenged contemporaneous theorizations of
the public sphere as an enlightened space of rational, language-­based exchange, and
thereby also resisted the imperial logics generated through that same sphere.14 But,
how did they do so, and in what forms? Another question might be: who could con-
stitute a public or a publicly recognized subject within the short-­lived Fourth Repub-
lic, or the Fifth, which followed it? For whom did they do so? In what kind of space
and in what kind of temporality? To answer these questions, the chapters of this book
trace an arc from the administrative control of urban (and ostensibly public) space
to its reoccupation by those subjects positioned by the statist apparati as “invisible.”
In so doing, this book demarcates how both official and invisible modes of occupa-
tion drew upon the past even as they formulated alternative projections of the future.
To some degree, this means challenging the kinds of visual production that have
entered the canonical understanding of the period with those that have not, in order
to understand the processes that the former privilege. Thus, while this is a book about
art, it deliberately understands that term broadly, considering work made in a variety
of media, and by a host of differently schooled players. In order to avoid reinforcing
the hierarchical division between advanced artistic practice and popular experiences
and practices throughout the mid-­t wentieth century, the phrase “decolonizing art,”

9
 which I use throughout this book, deliberately plays on the double valence of the
introduction

word “decolonizing.” Here it is intended in both its adjectival form, wherein the art
is part and parcel of the historical contest fought over decolonization, and as a verb,
wherein the action being named shifts to our own attempts to “decolonize” the field
of art and its history in accordance with efforts to differently imagine alternative
representational possibilities. In what follows, therefore, I endeavor to shift the as-
cription of agency away from individual artists and intellectuals and instead toward
communities and crowds, as is consistent with my claim that decolonization was the
motivating and animating factor of these practices. This means exploring and using
two archives, the one official, the other popular and ephemeral, and doing so in ways
that mine the contradictions between the two as sources of productive re-­imaginings.
This book’s expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-
tion. To place a politics of cultural memory outside the dominant institutions of the
archive or the museum (and beyond the artifacts and art objects that fill them) sug-
gests new genealogies for the visual practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-­
first centuries. The goal here lies not simply in indicating that the history and the
voices of the subaltern have been occluded in the visual histories of a particular period,
but rather that such silencing actually constitutes our historically received concept of
the visual. To attempt to reawaken those voices or to prepare for that reawakening is
to revise and renew the visual as a sensorial process, one that is linked to the processes
of speech and sound and their duration in space, and so a constituent component of
experience and its realization. Of necessity, then, this book investigates the points at
which theories of political representation crossed paths with theories and models of
aesthetic representation. Thus, visual—­and to a lesser degree, aural—­production is
treated here within the context of contemporaneous art criticism, but also in concrete
relationship to the broader debates about citizenship and representational democracy
that decolonization occasioned. In these contexts, it should be emphasized that nei-
ther my skills nor my interests are those of a historian per se. In the pages that follow
I am less interested in correcting the historical record or indeed replacing one written
around French names with another written around those of Algerians or other subal-
terns. Rather, I am interested in analyzing the processes by which these debates about
belonging and the nation have been—­and continue to be—­represented, especially in-
sofar as these representations turn on non-­representation or invisibility.
From a Nation Torn is written in three parts, which roughly follow a chronology
from the mid-1940s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962,
with a brief, concluding consideration of the legacy left by these events and a nod to
how we might model a practice of decolonial looking in the present.15 In addition
to their chronological order, the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-
ent representational modalities—­space, language, and image—­and to the ways in
which each modality is both contingent upon and constitutive of experience. At the
same time, each part of the book negotiates the impossibility of locating a precise or
exact correspondence between representation and experience in a world predicated

10
exclusively on visual engagement. That is to say, each chapter’s analysis turns on un-

introduction
derstanding the shifting historical reasons why the visual cannot be understood with-
out recourse to other cultural and political realms that interact with it. With that in
mind, the first part of the book considers how urban space is generated according to
the logic of pictorial aestheticization; the second considers avant-­garde techniques
squarely in dialogue with the semiotic and acoustic properties of language, in its
filmic, literary, and spoken iterations; and the third considers the photographic image
that haunts both of these first two categories.
Part I, “Fragments and Facades: André Malraux and the Image of the Past as
the Future of the Present,” grounds the book’s assessment of public experience in an
analy­sis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-
sideration. This I understand as quite literally setting the stage for the possibilities of
imagining or picturing public participation on both the national and the individual
level that animate the next two parts of the book. In this section of the book, I the-
orize what it would mean to consider the actual parameters of such participation as
having been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the
Vichy period (1940 to 1944) as well as in the North African capitals that had been
built or rebuilt according to the standards of French imperialism in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter, “Fragments; or, The Ends of
Photography,” examines the mid-­century ambitions to “restore” central Paris that
were articulated by André Malraux, France’s first minister of culture (1959–1969). I
understand these ambitions through the lens of the decontextualized, photography-­
based aesthetic models that Malraux cultivated in the obsessive revisions to which he
put his seminal treatise Les voix du silence, from 1937–1951.
Refuting standard readings of Malraux’s written work as simply an exemplum
of high-­modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the
museum and/or photography, this chapter defines instead what I call Malraux’s “am-
nesiac aesthetics.” Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually
enable when Malraux would become France’s first minister of culture (1959–1969) is
a model of historical experience that simultaneously refutes both the possibility of
knowledge about the past and cognizance of the conditions of the present. I argue
that such a model is deeply implicated in the crises of the nation that were occasioned
by the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Algerian War of Indepen-
dence. While Malraux was presented as a preservationist, his urban visions actually
extended his radically decontextualized aesthetics to the real space of the city as it was
used and experienced by inhabitants of all backgrounds, but particularly those who
could be identified as foreign. This created what I call a “space of silence,” which was
profoundly rooted in Malraux’s understanding of both the semiotic spacing of the
museum and the fictional capacities of the photographic apparatus, the device upon
which his entire aesthetic model depends. In this attention to fiction and the semi-
otics that sustain it, the first chapter also frames how the succeeding chapters treat
language—­in both its sonic and its visual properties—­within the space of the city.

11
 Finally, it frames the ways in which the photographic image and the near-­incessant
introduction

re-­theorizations of its function complement and sometimes complicate the way lan-
guage is discussed in the rest of the book.
By redefining large swaths of urban space as subject to the conservation principles
previously ascribed to monumental architectural patrimony, Malraux’s urban vision
placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-
nary and its relationship to the long durée of the past. In fact, Malraux’s model did
so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the
Algerian War of Independence. These considerations constitute the material focus of
chapter 2, “Façades; or, The Space of Silence.” Here, I suggest that Malraux’s “amne-
siac aesthetics” inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort
to render invisible that would characterize the state’s response to the recent history of
anti-­imperial opposition and did so in order that the city might symbolically elide the
visible evidence of a failed colonial project, both materially and in terms of the vari-
ous populations that inhabited the restored areas. In so doing, the silence that Mal-
raux hoped to engender through an aesthetic model would come to speak volumes.
Part II of this book, “Between Resistance and Refusal: The Language of Art and
Its Publics,” continues to assess the relationships between the 1940s and the early
1960s—­that is to say, between the end of the Second World War (and the Holocaust,
which so often stands as a synecdoche for the longer war) and the official end of the
Algerian War of Independence in 1962. In this case, however, rather than focus on
the official discourse of governmental and bureaucratic interventions (even as me-
diated by aesthetic theories), the discussion here focuses on the specific optic of the
so-­called advanced art practices that explicitly engaged with a legacy of avant-­garde
production even as they attempted—­and often failed—­to subvert the institutional
and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded. In particular,
chapter 3, “Sonic Youth, Sonic Space: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-
territorialization,” establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision,
language, and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late
1940s, but which were often occluded by discourse meant to universalize the experi-
ence of the Shoah as the defining catastrophe of modern history and as the grounds of
eventual European consolidation. In this chapter, I analyze the multimedia work—­
including poetry, film, and performance—­produced by a group of artists affiliated
with the Paris-­based movement known as Lettrism. The work of Isidore Isou, a Jew-
ish exile from Romania (where he had survived the extermination camps to the East)
and other Lettrists in Paris attempted to create a “spatialized” language that they
hoped would circumvent traditional language’s embeddedness in routine, everyday
perception and its calcification as the result of the consolidation of national boundar-
ies throughout the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that it was the Lettrists’
hope that this reconceptualization would engender new tools of discourse and, in so
doing, enable communication and representation beyond the limitations of spaces
demarcated by national language. In this, they aimed to foment a deterritorialized

12
language based on the shared experience of sonic immersion and immediacy. Similar

introduction
efforts are addressed in relationship to Isou’s film, Traité de bave et d’ éternité (Treatise
on Drool and Eternity, 1952), which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a
site of presumptive peace.
By 1961, Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isou’s representational
gambits had tried to remind viewers it was, either metaphorically or by association.
Chapter 4 thus further examines urban articulation and expression within this con-
text, taking a more acute focus on the Algerian War of Independence as it came to
be represented in the metropolitan capital. While it maintains the focus on both the
subject and the object conjured by the same broadly conceived aesthetic registers of
Isou’s Lettrism, the fourth chapter, “La France déchirée: The Politics of Represen-
tation and the Spaces In-Between,” turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-
tice. It looks at décollage, a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces
away, rather than adding them on. This pictorial innovation was created in 1949 by
Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé when they mounted an accumulation of van-
dalized street posters onto canvas. This chapter takes particular focus on La France
déchirée (Torn Apart France), a 1961 exhibition of Hains’s and Villeglé’s décollage
that meant to make reference to the political divisions then tearing at the nation as
a result of the wars of independence in Indochina and Algeria. Here, I explicitly ex-
amine the particular problems of representing, experiencing, and ultimately contest-
ing what contemporary political speech and popular discourse tried to dismiss as a
non-­war. This leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-
resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas: 1) the art objects
produced by the décollagistes; and 2) the challenge that décollage presented to the
semi-­private space of the gallery. I argue that Hains’s and Villeglé’s 1961 installation
of décollages—­culled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the
accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concerned—­engages
in a critique of both institutional space and universalist, participatory democracy,
pointedly helping us to see the limitations of both as they were experienced during
the period under discussion. Moreover, the model of aesthetic practice generated by
their art leads to a consideration of how French leftists could and did use aesthetic
practices to generate spaces of appearance in which the claims of citizens upon the
nation-­state and its vessels might be better heard or seen. Such an analysis forces an
explicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of
articulating an “engaged” art during the historical period of the French Resistance,
which I do in order to demonstrate how these tactics are not as historically stable
as we have come to understand them in the overarching periodization of a mythic
“post-­war” production. It also provides an opportunity to further trace the impact
that photography would continue to have on aesthetic thinking throughout the pe-
riod, a leitmotif that runs through the book.
The third and final part of the book, “Reidentifications: Seeing Citizens Being
Seen,” turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

13
 implicitly, and at times explicitly, give rise to and inform the practices studied in the
introduction

first four chapters, emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn
to see these practices as such. To this end, chapter 5, “‘The Eye of History’: Photo-
journalism, Protest, and the Manifestation of 17 October 1961,” returns the reader to
the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malraux’s “aesthetics of amnesia.”
This chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 1961 by tens of
thousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect
of police, Maurice Papon.16 The photographic capture of the brutal suppression that
marked the French response to this Algerian demonstration allows me to position it
as a visual cultural event on the same order as any other mode of representation, and
in specific dialogue with the image of the city—­authored, so to speak, by such ef-
forts to “silence” and to scotomize as suggested by Malraux’s revisionist urbanism.
Rather than dwell on the question of whether these images do or do not objectify or
appropriate the experience of the subjects they depict, and rather than celebrate them
as photographs “taken” by authorial agents, I read them as an effort to make room
for an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise
allotted to them. The model of photographic possibility that I develop here encour-
ages a reconsideration of the politics of picturing in a period largely understood to be
coincident with the spectacularization of everyday life and which, as such, is associ-
ated with a presumed need to denigrate the claims of certain genres of photographic
practice. In brief, this tendency marks the transition between so-­called modern and
post-­modern aesthetics, both of which, I want to underscore in this book, result in
the same visual aporias, precisely because they repeat the same incapacity to see the
colonial conditions at their core.
The book’s final chapter presents a retrospective glance at these aesthetic dynam-
ics as mapped across the first five chapters and as newly parsed in more recent visual
practices. This chapter focuses on the film Caché (Hidden, 2005), directed by Michael
Haneke, analyzing it as a series of tableaux generated by an image-­maker, rather than
as a narrative made by a filmmaker. This last chapter also examines a twelve-­minute
digital video, Europa 2005–27 octobre (2006), directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-­
Marie Straub, who drew on the tradition of the cinétracts circulated as models of left-
ist agitation in the 1960s. The importance of the dialogue staged by these two works,
each of which tells us how to look at contemporary experience as history, is triangu-
lated with an analysis of The Algerian Annex, by Dennis Adams, as it was installed
at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1989. This analysis is underscored
from the point of view of 2005, which I argue was a momentous year in the history of
the “postcolony” as Mbembe has defined it, which is to say not at all as a place “after”
or free from the effects of colonization.17 It was in 2005, after all, that the French gov-
ernment responded to urban insurrections that began just outside of Paris by issuing a
state of emergency in accordance with laws first developed to contain colonial dissent.
In this retrospective view, “Looking Past the State of Emergency” serves as a coda to
the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

14
posing a model of reception based on a different articulation of the ethics of seeing,

introduction
looking, and watching. It also brings the book’s arguments about the period of de-
colonization to bear on France’s contemporary problems of integrating, symboli­cally
and literally, ethnic and racial others within the national public today. Such integra-
tions, I suggest, are in accord with what we have learned to see as the claims made on
behalf of a decolonized visibility.

Remembering the Present

In telling this story, and indeed in telling the many stories from which it is formed,
this book aims to respond to the galvanizing challenge presented by the art histo-
rian David Joselit: that we reimagine our ambition in writing art history as one orga-
nized toward the imperative of writing something like a work of political science.18
As I understand it, this means reading art objects and the visualities they engender
as primary sites of theorization and analysis, rather than as secondary or tertiary
epiphenomena. It also means understanding them as essential sites of conflict and
evaluation. More than just a question of rhetoric, to “decolonize art,” as this project
proposes, is to generate new platforms from which to understand, critique, and theo-
rize the very same image culture(s) that we presume we know so well. It also demands
that we reimagine the roles that diverse visual vocabularies play in enacting public
participation, a core component of political theory and practice.
As opportunities to figure and refigure public modalities of belonging and partici­
pation, the aesthetic practices I examine were not merely secondary effects. Rather,
they were a primary ground upon which the conditions of coloniality and postcolo-
niality were imagined and contested. Indeed, through the various regimes of the spa-
tial, the linguistic, the sonic, and the visual—and through the resulting politics of
publicness they all engendered or refused—colonizer and colonized fought a pitched
battle. The stakes of this battle, I argue, were nothing less than the continuing as-
cendancy of colonialism or the incipient decolonization of a subaltern multitude. By
repositioning the stakes of achieving visibility—­or what we might think of as percep-
tibility—­in this way, this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the
myopic stronghold that Guy Debord’s construction of “the spectacle” as monocular
and unidirectional has long had over the period’s analysis. Instead, this book spatial-
izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen, insisting upon its multiple and
material vantage points as sites of engaged political practice.
Most of this book’s writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that
some have referred to as “the war on terror,” and which others have decried as a “per-
manent” or “perpetual” war.19 The imperative to understand my work as a reader of
aesthetic objects in relationship to this war—­as informed by the fact that I have lived
through and during it—­has motivated the work and the analysis I present here. Over
the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 1950s and
1960s, I have seen there signs of the present that struck me simultaneously as all too
familiar and yet all too unthinkable, even as I continued to hear their echo in news

15
 from Iraq or Afghanistan on my radio or see their doubles in the photographs, for
introduction

example, issuing from Abu Ghraib that arrived with such frequency into my inbox.
In light of the urgencies of our own moment, it has become increasingly impossible,
not to mention perhaps unethical, not to acknowledge what it was that I, trained as
a proper modernist, had learned not to see, or worse, learned to deliberately ignore
in this earlier period. In this book, therefore, I attempt to reverse the effects of that
blindness; to imagine that making, receiving, arguing, presenting, and postulating
during history means maintaining more than simply a sense of being contemporary
to, but instead, of being contemporary with, and engaging in. As the philosopher and
literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, who figures so prominently in this book, wrote in
a retrospective glance toward his own position in the period of history analyzed here:
We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it
is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all
formulations which would imply the future—­that which is yet to come—­if the
disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every
arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch
as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in
which to think it.
It is time to see beyond the disaster. Let us instead look at what the disaster, such as
it has been thought, did not see.20

16
 notes

Introduction: art during war and the potentialities

of decolonial representation
1  In important ways, this ambition to understand what the art of the French 1950s and
1960s was coincident with corresponds to Terry Smith’s efforts to historicize the notion of
“contemporaneity” that is so fundamental to the study of contemporary art. See Smith,
What Is Contemporary Art? and the collection of essays in Smith, Enwezor, and Condee,
Antinomies of Art and Culture.
2  Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (L’Écriture du désastre), passim.
3  This is all the more surprising given the persistent efforts within the field to understand
the origins of modern aesthetic practices in relation to these same colonial and imperial
occupations, especially as they issued from France, and especially in relation to the sub­
genre of Orientalist painting. Here, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Extremities is exemplary
for its analysis of early nineteenth-­century French painting in relation to imperial con­
quest and slavery.
4  The extensive historical literature about the war that was fought to achieve Algerian
sovereignty has made a great deal of the fact that the war was “sans nom” (nameless),
although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many names—­events, operation,
pacification, rebellion, revolution, insurgency—­even if the effect is precisely the same.
Regardless of the state’s reluctance to name the war as such, it was still often referred to
in precisely that way in much of the popular discourse of the time. It was not until 10
June 1999 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre d’Algérie.
In Algeria, it is called both La guerre de libération nationale and La révolution Algérienne,
or Thawra Jazā’ iriya in Arabic, terms which both carry their own ideological baggage.
See Blandine Grosjean, “La France reconnaît qu’elle a fait la ‘guerre’ en Algérie. L’assem­
blée vote aujourd’hui un texte qui enterre le terme official d’ ‘opérations de maintien de
l’ordre,’” Libération, 10 June 1999, www.liberation.fr. I have chosen to use the term “Alge­
rian War of Independence” throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis­
tinguish the 1954–1962 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War. Although it is not
conventional in English-­language scholarship, I note that calling it the “Algerian War of
Liberation” would perhaps better reinscribe the Algerians’ agency in both the fight and

221
 its naming. To this end, there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call­
notes for the introduction

ing the war the “Algerian Revolution.” I do not use that term, however, because I want to
maintain emphasis on the fact that this was a war that France fought against the Algerians
as much as it was one that the Algerians fought for themselves. On the topic of naming,
I should clarify that in order to avoid the self-­legitimating tendency of French colonial
law, which endeavored to consolidate autochthonous Algerians as well as a diverse array
of migrants as “indigènes,” I will refer to non-­European populations in Algeria as “Alge­
rians” and the European (and primarily French) populations as “settlers.” My thanks to
one of the anonymous readers of an earlier draft of this book for this suggestion, and to
Julia Clancy-­Smith, whose research has been very helpful in helping to illustrate how
even the “indigenous Algerian” population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants
from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. See Clancy-­Smith, “Exoti­
cism, Erasures, and Absences,” 23. Specifics regarding the rights these various populations
enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters, especially chapters 4 and 5, which focus
more specifically on the “Algerian” populations in France during the Algerian War of
Independence itself.
5  Hannoum’s designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of
“France in Algeria,” which is the subtitle of his book, Violent Modernity. Here I am inter­
ested in the term for its correctives to the more utopian characterizations of “alterna­
tive” or “simultaneous” modernities, for example, those that would seem to slight the core
fact that modernity was and is inherently built from and intertwined with a history of
exploitation and colonization.
6  Fordetails on the massacre, see Benot, Massacres coloniaux, 1944–1950, esp. 9–36; and
Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 149–150. Questions of when and where the Algerian War of Inde­
pendence or the resistance it engendered began are equally questions of representation.
Indeed, many in Algeria extend the war’s timeline all the way back, in fact, to 1830 and
the Ottoman resistance to the French landing, thereby attempting to ground the roots of
“Algerian-­ness” in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one. This is the
story presented in the Museé national du moudjahid in Algiers, which is overseen entirely
by the Ministry of the Moudjahid and presents a view of history sometimes at odds with
the same chronology privileged, for example, in the nearby Musée de l’armée.
7  More specifically, Colin de Verdière also acknowledged that the massacre at Sétif was
an “inexcusable tragedy.” See “Algerians Remember Massacres of 1945,” Washington Post,
9 May 2005, www.washingtonpost.com.
8  The date 1 November 1954 is now known as la toussaint sanglante (Bloody All Saints
Day), and, in Algeria, commemorates the concerted and systematic attacks that were
launched against both French military and civilian targets in the rural regions of Algeria.
On this day the leadership of the FLN issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across
the region, asking them to fight for the “restoration of the Algerian state—­sovereign,
demo­cratic and social—­within the framework of the principles of Islam.” This call contin­
ued to define the terms of the Algerian resistance to French occupation over the next eight
years, and still structures the retrospective imposition of a unified consensus in the fight
for Algerian sovereignty. This consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of
“Un seul hero, le peuple” (A single hero: the people), or “La révolution par le peuple pour le
people” (The revolution by the people, for the people).

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9  Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” 44.

notes for the introduction

10  In his essay “Provincializing France?” Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon
the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolo-
nial Thought and Historical Difference.
11  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 45.
12  My interests run tandem to but do not reduplicate those presented by various leading
historians of France whose reflections on the personal and intellectual reasons for their
continued interest in France even though the myths to which the country was once so
romantically aligned have been so effectively debunked are assembled by Downs and Ger­
son in Why France?.
13  Mbembe, “Figures of Multiplicity,” 57.
14  Arendt, The Human Condition, 199.
15  Inthinking about a decolonial practice of looking as related to the project of imagin­
ing the representational possibilities of a temporality positioned during and not post-­war,
I am also thinking of Walter Mignolo’s recent work on the “decolonial option,” especially
the “Decolonial Aesthetics” manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at
Duke University’s Jameson Gallery in April 2011. See also Mignolo, “Delinking.”
16  While the English-­language prefers the word “demonstration” to “manifestation,” the
translation loses something important to the French. “Manifestation” efficiently suggests
the quality of “making manifest” that is associated with the root term “manifeste” (mani­
festo), as both a political and an artistic genre. The English “demonstration” places much
more emphasis on showing and also diminishes the comparison between the kinds of use
to which Malraux wanted to put Paris in making it the site of his first Manifestation bien-
nale et internationale des jeunes artistes, as discussed in chapter 2, and the use of the Alge­
rian ambitions for the same space.
17  See Mbembe, Notes on the Postcolony, esp. 14–15, wherein Mbembe describes the impos­
sibility of attributing “post-” coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory. See
also 102, where he describes the “postcolony” in relationship to the ongoing challenges
orchestrated by “societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the
violence which the colonial relationship involves.” It is this combined historical specificity
and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembe’s formulations so helpful for a project of think­
ing about the durational significance of decolonization.
18  Joselit renders this charge in the manifesto that concludes his book Feedback, 171–173.
19  The phrase “war on terror,” first used by President George W. Bush on 20 September
2001, announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-­Qaeda and any other
organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats. In 2009, President Barack
Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term “Overseas Contingency
Operation.” In 2013, he asked that the war, however named, be considered as over. The
politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil­
ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts],
Afflicted Powers.
20  Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, 1.

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