Hannah Feldman. From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962.

Abstract

In From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962, Hannah Feldman posits that the expression “postwar” attached to the normative history and culture of France in the era between 1945 and 1962 is misleading, and that it speaks for a nation that refused to see the wars that divided France over the future of its colonies and over the memory of Vichy at that time. Looking for contesting voices, Feldman dusts off and contextualizes a selection of art-related testimonies dating from those years, created by individuals who were most likely to be sensitive to the “decolonization” issues of their time given their origins and/or views on colonialism, and finds little reassurance from most. An interdisciplinary art historian with sympathies for postcolonial criticism, Feldman starts her text with André Malraux's art survey Les voix du silence from 1951, a text known for its disregard of chronology and for its intriguing juxtapositions of art from colonizer and colonized cultures on the pages of an “imaginary museum.” As a young man, Malraux opposed colonialism and later fought the Nazis. For Feldman, however, Les voix du silence follows the official formalist line, for it “severs objects from their own history in order to render them mute participants in the one he wants to construct around the temporality of the present” (p. 27). Feldman also condemns Malraux's plans for the beautification of Paris, especially the gentrification of the old Jewish neighborhood Le Marais, for ignoring the expulsion of the Algerian workers living there to ugly suburbs.