from a nation torn by hannah feldman

36
FROM A NATION TORN Decolonizing  Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 HANNAH FELDMAN

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Page 1: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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FROM A NATION TORN

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 336

OBJECTS HISTORIES Critical Perspectives

on Art Material Culture and Representation

A SERIES EDITED BY NICHOLAS THOMAS

Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation

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FROM A NATION TORNDecolonizing Art and Representation

in France 1945ndash1962

Hannah Feldman

Duke University Press Durham and London 983090983088983089983092

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 536

copy 983090983088983089983092 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and rade Gothic

by BWampA Books Inc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman HannahFrom a nation torn decolonizing art and representation in France 983089983097983092983093ndash983089983097983094983090

Hannah Feldman

pages cm mdash (ObjectsHistories)

Includes bibliographical references and index

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983093983094-983088 (cloth alk paper)

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983095983089-983091 (pbk alk paper)

983089 ArtmdashPolitical aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983090 Art and statemdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983091 DecolonizationmdashSocial aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

I itle II Series Objectshistories

983150983095983090983152983094983142983092983093 983090983088983089983092

983095983088983097983092983092983088983097983088983092983093mdashdc983090983091

983090983088983089983091983088983092983090983096983091983094

Tis book was made possible by a collaborative grant

from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation

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To the family

that sustained me

throughout the writing

of this bookmdash

Jorge Lola and Addie

Thank you

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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983150

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xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 2: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 236

FROM A NATION TORN

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 336

OBJECTS HISTORIES Critical Perspectives

on Art Material Culture and Representation

A SERIES EDITED BY NICHOLAS THOMAS

Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 436

FROM A NATION TORNDecolonizing Art and Representation

in France 1945ndash1962

Hannah Feldman

Duke University Press Durham and London 983090983088983089983092

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 536

copy 983090983088983089983092 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and rade Gothic

by BWampA Books Inc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman HannahFrom a nation torn decolonizing art and representation in France 983089983097983092983093ndash983089983097983094983090

Hannah Feldman

pages cm mdash (ObjectsHistories)

Includes bibliographical references and index

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983093983094-983088 (cloth alk paper)

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983095983089-983091 (pbk alk paper)

983089 ArtmdashPolitical aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983090 Art and statemdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983091 DecolonizationmdashSocial aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

I itle II Series Objectshistories

983150983095983090983152983094983142983092983093 983090983088983089983092

983095983088983097983092983092983088983097983088983092983093mdashdc983090983091

983090983088983089983091983088983092983090983096983091983094

Tis book was made possible by a collaborative grant

from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 636

To the family

that sustained me

throughout the writing

of this bookmdash

Jorge Lola and Addie

Thank you

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

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x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983145 983150

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 3: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 336

OBJECTS HISTORIES Critical Perspectives

on Art Material Culture and Representation

A SERIES EDITED BY NICHOLAS THOMAS

Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 436

FROM A NATION TORNDecolonizing Art and Representation

in France 1945ndash1962

Hannah Feldman

Duke University Press Durham and London 983090983088983089983092

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 536

copy 983090983088983089983092 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and rade Gothic

by BWampA Books Inc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman HannahFrom a nation torn decolonizing art and representation in France 983089983097983092983093ndash983089983097983094983090

Hannah Feldman

pages cm mdash (ObjectsHistories)

Includes bibliographical references and index

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983093983094-983088 (cloth alk paper)

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983095983089-983091 (pbk alk paper)

983089 ArtmdashPolitical aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983090 Art and statemdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983091 DecolonizationmdashSocial aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

I itle II Series Objectshistories

983150983095983090983152983094983142983092983093 983090983088983089983092

983095983088983097983092983092983088983097983088983092983093mdashdc983090983091

983090983088983089983091983088983092983090983096983091983094

Tis book was made possible by a collaborative grant

from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 636

To the family

that sustained me

throughout the writing

of this bookmdash

Jorge Lola and Addie

Thank you

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 836

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 936

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1036

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1136

983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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983157

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xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983145 983150

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983150

983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 4: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 436

FROM A NATION TORNDecolonizing Art and Representation

in France 1945ndash1962

Hannah Feldman

Duke University Press Durham and London 983090983088983089983092

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 536

copy 983090983088983089983092 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and rade Gothic

by BWampA Books Inc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman HannahFrom a nation torn decolonizing art and representation in France 983089983097983092983093ndash983089983097983094983090

Hannah Feldman

pages cm mdash (ObjectsHistories)

Includes bibliographical references and index

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983093983094-983088 (cloth alk paper)

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983095983089-983091 (pbk alk paper)

983089 ArtmdashPolitical aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983090 Art and statemdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983091 DecolonizationmdashSocial aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

I itle II Series Objectshistories

983150983095983090983152983094983142983092983093 983090983088983089983092

983095983088983097983092983092983088983097983088983092983093mdashdc983090983091

983090983088983089983091983088983092983090983096983091983094

Tis book was made possible by a collaborative grant

from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 636

To the family

that sustained me

throughout the writing

of this bookmdash

Jorge Lola and Addie

Thank you

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 836

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 936

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1036

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1136

983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1236

983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983145 983150

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 5: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 536

copy 983090983088983089983092 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and rade Gothic

by BWampA Books Inc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman HannahFrom a nation torn decolonizing art and representation in France 983089983097983092983093ndash983089983097983094983090

Hannah Feldman

pages cm mdash (ObjectsHistories)

Includes bibliographical references and index

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983093983094-983088 (cloth alk paper)

983145983155983138983150 983097983095983096-983088-983096983090983090983091-983093983091983095983089-983091 (pbk alk paper)

983089 ArtmdashPolitical aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983090 Art and statemdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

983091 DecolonizationmdashSocial aspectsmdashFrancemdashHistorymdash983090983088th century

I itle II Series Objectshistories

983150983095983090983152983094983142983092983093 983090983088983089983092

983095983088983097983092983092983088983097983088983092983093mdashdc983090983091

983090983088983089983091983088983092983090983096983091983094

Tis book was made possible by a collaborative grant

from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 636

To the family

that sustained me

throughout the writing

of this bookmdash

Jorge Lola and Addie

Thank you

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 836

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1036

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1136

983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1336

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 6: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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To the family

that sustained me

throughout the writing

of this bookmdash

Jorge Lola and Addie

Thank you

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1036

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1136

983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983137 983139 983147 983150 983151 983159

983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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983137 983139 983147 983150 983151 983159

983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983145 983150

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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983137 983139 983147 983150 983151 983159

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983150

983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation 983089

I FRAGMENTS AND FACcedilADES ANDREacute MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PASTAS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1 Fragments or Te Ends of Photography 983089983097

2 Faccedilades or Te Space of Silence 983092983089

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS

3 Sonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics ofDeterritorialization 983095983095

4 La France Deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 983089983088983097

III REIDENTIFICATIONS SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

5 ldquoTe Eye of Historyrdquo Photojournalism Protest and the Manifestation

of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983097

6 Looking Past the State of Emergency A Coda 983090983088983089 Notes 983090983090983089

Bibliography 983090983095983089

Index 983091983088983093

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983150

983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 1136

983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983145 983150

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

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x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983137 983139 983147 983150 983151 983159

983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

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983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983148 983148

983157

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983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

x

44 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute photogram of unfinished film Deacutefense

drsquoaffichermdashLoi du 983090983097 juillet 983089983096983096983089 983089983097983093983088 983089983089983092

45 Raymond Hains La palissade des emplacements reacuteserveacutes as installed in the ldquoSalledes Informelsrdquo at the first Paris Biennale 983089983097983093983097 983089983089983095

46 and 47 Raymond Hains La palissade agrave de Feugas Manifeste du 983091 octobre 983093983097 et la poubelle de lrsquo eacutecole des Beaux Arts de Blois 983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983097983094 983089983089983096

48 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains with Lrsquoentremets de

la palissade de Raymond Hains 983089983097983094983088 983089983090983088

49 Gilles Raysse photograph Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Reacutealisme

983089983097983094983089 983089983090983089

410 and 411 Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute details Heacutepeacuterile eacuteclateacute 983089983097983093983091 983089983090983090

412ndash414 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on the streetwith political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983092ndash983089983090983093

415 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains in his apartmentat 983090983094 rue Delambre Paris 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983095

416 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Cet homme est dangereux 983089983097983093983095 983089983090983097

417 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph Raymond Hains Cet homme est

dangereux 983089983097983093983095 as installed at the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983090983097

418 and 419 Galerie Colette Allendy cover and inside invitation to Photographies

hypnagogiques an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983090

420 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Chimegravere drsquoArezzo 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

421 Raymond Hains gelatin-silver print Le conqueacuterant 983089983097983092983095 983089983091983091

422 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Paix en Algeacuterie 983089983097983093983094 983089983091983093

423 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the constitutionalreferendum of 983090983096 September 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983094

424 Unknown graphic artist poster advocating a ldquoouirdquo vote in the referendum of983096 January 983089983097983094983089 concerning Algerian auto-determination 983089983091983095

425 Agence-France Presse (983105983142983152) photograph Charles de Gaulle with his arms raisedin a ldquoVrdquo for ldquovictoryrdquo Constantine (Qusanticircnah) 983092 June 983089983097983093983096 983089983091983095

426 Raymond Hains deacutecollage Crsquoest ccedila le reacutenouveau 983089983097983093983097 983089983092983093

427 and 428 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photographs Raymond Hains on thestreet with political graffiti 983089983097983094983089 983089983092983095 983089983092983097

429 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph pedestrians and onlookers outsideGalerie J during the opening of La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983089

430 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph gallery-owner Janine Restanyinstalling a work by Jacques Villegleacute in the exhibition La France deacutechireacutee Galerie JParis 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983090

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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983137 983139 983147 983150 983151 983159

983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983145 983150

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983148 983148

983157

983155 983156 983154

983137 983156 983145 983151

983150

983155

xi

431 Harry Shunk and Jaacutenos Kender photograph onlookers at the opening of theexhibition La France deacutechireacutee 983089983097983094983089 983089983093983091

51 Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marcheacute Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983090983088983089983089 983089983094983089

52 Jean exier photograph graffiti on the Quai de Conti November 983089983097983094983089 ldquoIci onnoie les Algeacuteriensrdquo (Here we drown Algerians) 983089983094983090

53 France-Soir map of the Algeriansrsquo points of departure into Paris for thedemonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 published 983089983097 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983090

54 Unknown photographer the Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983092

55 Gustave Caillebotte oil on canvas Paris Street Rainy Day 983089983096983095983095 Art Institute ofChicago 983089983095983094

56 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Boulevard des Italiens 983089983097983091983091 983089983095983094

57 Brassaiuml (Gyula Halasz) gelatin-silver print Les grands boulevards pedestrians in front of a poster for the film ldquoLe Diable au Corpsrdquo circa 983089983097983092983095 983089983095983095

58 Unknown photographer demonstrators in front of the cineacutema Berlitz983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983095983096

59 Gaston Paris photograph Le cineacutema Berlitz 983089983097983093983093 983089983096983089

510 Roger Berson photograph Le Palais Berlitz showing the exhibition poster forLe Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983090

511 and 512 Roger Berson installation views Le Juif et la France 983089983097983092983089 983089983096983091

513Unknown photographer cover of Paris Match ldquoNuit de troubles agrave Parisrdquopublished 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983095

514ndash517 Raymond Darolle and Geacuterard Meacutenager photographs documentingthe Algerian demonstration of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 as printed in Paris Match 983090983096 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983096983096ndash983089983097983089

518 Elie Kagan photograph Abdelkader Bennehar Algerian demonstrator injuredand on the ground Nanterre 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983092

519 Elie Kagan photograph arrested demonstrators Paris Meacutetro Place de laConcorde 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089 983089983097983094

520 Reneacute-Jacques photograph Place de la Concorde circa 983089983097983093983093 983089983097983096

61 Dennis Adams installation detail Te Algerian Annex 983089983097983096983097 983090983088983091

62ndash65 Michael Haneke (dir) film stills from Cacheacute 983090983088983088983093 983090983088983094ndash983090983088983096

66 Jean-Franccedilois Deroubaix photograph ldquoFifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois(Seine-Saint-Denis)rdquo 983091983089 October 983090983088983088983093 983090983089983090

67 Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs) video still Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 Octobre 983090983088983088983094 983090983089983094

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983145 983150

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983145 983150

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983150

983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

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983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this bookmdashwhich feels like as long as I canremembermdashI have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that willpreface it Te gratitude I feel to the many friends family members colleagues andstudents who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way oranother has long both moved and motivated me and I am honored finally to rendermy thanks publicly Tey 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 allthe same

Te research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support

from a number of institutions including the J Paul Getty rust which funded acrucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and NorthwesternUniversityTe Graduate School which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant AtNorthwestern I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Fac-ulty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute forthe Humanities Doctoral grants from the Samuel H Kress Foundation the MellonFoundation the Ambassade de France aux Eacutetats-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand) andthe 983123983120983110983110983105 (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 Bibliothegraveque nationale de France (BnF)the Bibliothegraveque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou the Institut nationalde lrsquoaudiovisuel (983113983118983105) the Bibliothegraveque documentaire internationale contemporaine(983106983108983113983107) the Museacutee de lrsquohistoire contemporaine the Museacutee drsquoart modern de la Villede Paris the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Keystone-Eyedeaarchives Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois Eric Mircher and AlainCueff allowed me access to their archives and I remain grateful for their generousassistance 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 Adamsmdasha phenomenal artist but also an archivist in his own

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983145 983150

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983151

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983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

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983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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xiv

fashionmdashdeserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only de-tails regarding his own work but illuminating insights into the issues that underlieour mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization

Versions of the arguments about deacutecollage presented in chapter 983092 have been pub-lished as ldquoOf the Public Born Raymond Hains and La France deacutechireacutee rdquo in October

983089983088983096 (983090983088983088983092) 983095983091ndash983097983094 and as ldquoWords Actions Inactions and Tings Reality BetweenLa Reacutesistance and Lrsquoinsoumissionrdquo in New Realisms edited by Julia Robinson (MadridMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge MA 983117983113983124 Press 983090983088983089983088)983092983089ndash983093983090 Tanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publicationComponents of the arguments I make in chapter 983093 have been published in ldquoFlash For-ward Pictures at Warrdquo which was published in Photographyrsquos Orientalism New Essays

on Colonial Representation ed Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles Getty Re-search Institute 983090983088983089983091) 983089983093983091ndash983089983095983088 I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlanas 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 beenpresented 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 notthey remember a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at thesefora and I wish to thank them here Andreacute Dombrowski Josh Cole Gregg Bordo-witz Josh Shannon Dan Wang Matthew Jesse Jackson Darcy Grimaldo GrigsbySaloni Mathur Rebecca Zorach Nasser Rabat Chris Pinney and Anne Wagner Mygratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too short-lived writing group that included erri Weisman Meredith Davis Jason Weems and

Heacuterica 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 andBarry Bergdoll for having provided me with the toolsmdashnot to mention the willmdashnecessary to think about vision space and art in the particular ways that I try to inthese pages Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officiallyRosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertationthat 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 meNo matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia I must also saythat the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends andcolleagues including especially George Baker J Demos Roger Rothman MargaretSundell Candice Breitz Stephanie Schwartz and Nicoletta Leonardi A dear friendand an essential interlocutor since graduate school Rachel Haidu deserves all mygratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple read-ings she has given its many iterations Te strengths of my argument are due to herincisive intelligence Te weaknesses of course remain my own Claire Gilman has

also since the beginning been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally

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xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983137 983139 983147 983150 983151 983159

983148 983141 983140 983143 983149 983141 983150 983156 983155

xv

Since arriving at Northwestern I have been fortunate to participate in the excit-ing intellectual project that animates my departmentrsquos commitment to art historicalstudy I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable bothin art history and across campus especially in the Programs in Comparative LiteraryStudy and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with which I am also affili-

ated For their key support several colleagues deserve special mention Holly Claysonhas been a true friend a tremendous interlocutor and a very patient mentor-modelShe has also made me laugh more times than I can remember and deserves extrathanks for that Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a betterand 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 theirencouragement and support and Christina as well for her important friendship sincewe both arrived at Northwestern in the same year My (no-longer-junior-colleagues)Huey Copeland Krista Tompson 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 Tanks as well to Jesuacutes Escobar AnnGunter Rob Linrothe Claudia Swan Christina Normore Sarah Fraser and HamidNaficy who counts as one of us too Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Gar-raway Bonnie Honig Sam Weber Domietta orlasco Brian Edwards Josef BartonPeter Hayes Laura Hein Kelly Kaczynski Lane Relyea Dylan Penningroth Jessica Winegar Rebecca Johnson Robert Harriman Emily Maguire and Dilip Gaonkarhave also been important to the ideas articulated here

At Northwestern I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressivestudents and advisees and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributionsto 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 ErinReitz and Rory Sykes Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee and I willalways miss her keen intellect and great humor

Tis book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicatedpeople 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 hiscalm gentle prodding and for his long-standing interest in this project and to JadeBrooks for her expert advice and help over the years Although I understand little ofhow it works I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundationndashfunded ArtHistory Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support 983105983112983120983113 has pro-vided this book Te anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscriptprovided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript I hope theywill see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and pointsof interest Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too fre-

quently over-burdened sentences and both Chris Crochetiegravere and Barbara Williams

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983145 983150

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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xvi

at BWampA Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the pro-duction of this book Over the years I was the beneficiary of much excellent researchassistance but Max Allison Hannah Green and Luke Fidler merit special mentionLuke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout thefinal stages of readying the book for production and publication

Conversations with friends and colleaguesmdashwhether about the arguments inthis book or notmdashover the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasur-ably and improved my life exponentially I owe my gratitude to more people thanI can certainly name here Nonetheless I will try In no particular order RachelHaidu (again) Judith Rodenbeck Cecily Hilsdale Nell Andrew Lyle Massey JuliaBryan Wilson J Demos Paul Jaskot Keith opper Darby English Carrie Lam-bert Beatty Noit Banai Hannah Higgins Kader Attia erry Smith Carol DuncanSteven Nelson Iftikhar Dadi Andrew Hemingway Liz Kotz Tierry de Duve AliBehdad ony Cokes Esra Akcan Mary Roberts Carolin Behrmann Ann Marie

Yasin Michael Rakowitz Devon Fore Lori Waxman Adam Lehner Janet Kraynakanya Simon Julia Meltzer David Torne Nathalie Bouzaglo Jon Sachs StephanieSmith Miguel Amat Liz Mermin Linda Rattner Jessie Labov Stephanie FreedmanDarrell 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 thankshere not only for his early help with various research matters but for the long andrewarding 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 thisbook Tanks especially to my mother Linda Lowell for her unrelenting faith andconstant 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 Mybeautiful and brilliant nieces Sofia and Eleanor McDermott also deserve thanksfor all that they have taught me and all the reasonsmdashflying pigs and others toomdashthey have given me to hope Tanks to their parents Nancy Coronado and JamesMcDermott 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 theconstant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures human and canineTeir love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence al-beit in different ways o the bullies Lola and Adelaide and to their human Jorge Ioffer my greatest thanks I could not have done this without them nor would I havewanted to I dedicate this book to them and to the great memory of our small andstrange family even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk Lola a Kongtoss and Jorge so much more still

mdashHF

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983150

983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983145 983150

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983089

INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities

of Decolonial Representation

DEacuteCHIREMENTLACERATION (cruel painful)mdashThis term helps accredit the notion of

Historyrsquos 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

GUERREWARmdashThe 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)

mdashRoland Barthes ldquoAfrican Grammarrdquo The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 1957

This 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 983089983097983092983088s throughout the 983089983097983094983088s a place and a period about which we already as-

sume we know a great deal Tis 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983150

983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983145 983150

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983151

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983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

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983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983150

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983150

983090

pages intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire It follows that the art of this

period is not ldquo post - warrdquo 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 warmdashor wars as the case may be It is therefore art we need to understand

as ldquoart during - warrdquo 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 spacesmdashmaterial

and discursivemdashin which it circulated or from whence it drewsup1 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 ldquopostrdquo to ldquoduringrdquo

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 timebut also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history

more generally Over the course of this bookrsquos exposition I suggest that the periodi-

zation of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the ldquopostrdquo that pre-

cedes references to the Second World War as a generic ldquowarrdquo in the term ldquopost- warrdquo

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 periodrsquos cultural production Te 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 havealways understood war to be and for good reasons

As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above the linguistic strat-

egy that motivatesmdashor motivated in 983089983097983093983095mdashthe 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 ldquopacificationrdquo and ldquodeacutechirementrdquo 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 ldquocunningrdquo chronologi-

cal inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war the ldquoduringrdquo andindeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account

of ldquowriting the disasterrdquo with the retrospective finality of ldquopostrdquo sup2 Despite his cau-

tion however the historical categorization of ldquopost- warrdquo has managed to absorb and

so naturalize once again the rhetoricmdashBarthesrsquos allusion is specifically to the statersquos

rhetoricmdashthat meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of be-

ing ldquoatrdquo war into a time marked by being ldquoafterrdquo war

For art historians of the ldquopost- warrdquo 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-

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983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983154

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983141

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983140

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983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983150

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983150

983091

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

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-983089983097983092983088s through the mid-983089983097983094983088s or what I will hereafter refer to as

the decades of decolonization Having distanced ourselves and our objects from thecomplications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to

be ldquopostrdquo 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 claimssup3 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 983089983097983093983095 when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres

nouvelles mdashessays that would later form his Mythologies mdashFrance was embroiled in a

significant war even if at that time the official parlance to which Barthes alludes

did not name it as such1048628 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we

view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being ldquoaf-terrdquo to one attentive to the conditions of existence ldquoduringrdquo 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 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 983089983097983092983093 precisely on

983096 May a date much better celebrated in Western histories as ldquoVictory in Europe Dayrdquo

(983126983109 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 ldquoviolent modernityrdquo was begin-ning Rather than discontinuous and contained the history of war in France during

the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual1048629

Te centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War

of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Seacutetif uprisings

in Rachid Boucharebrsquos Hors la loi (Outside the Law 983090983088983089983088) As Boucharebrsquos film shows

with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic pro-

ductions that mimic them on 983096 May 983089983097983092983093 several thousand Algerians many of whom

had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in

uniform amassed in Seacutetif to join the 983126983109 Day celebrations that were taking place on

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983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983154

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983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983150

983092

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

ropolitan France1048630 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 Abbasrsquos Manifeste du peuple algeacuterien (983089983097983092983091) insisted be an ldquoAlgeacuterie libre et indeacutependanterdquo the

colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 983090983094-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 armymdashincluding militias stationed in nearby Guelma foreign legiontroops and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oranmdashto

intervene and restore peace Te military assault subsequently launched against the

people of Seacutetif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming

that in February 983090983088983088983093 the French ambassador to Algeria Hubert Colin de Verdiegravere

was forced to acknowledge it as a ldquomassacrerdquo in which according to historiansrsquo es-

timates approximately 983096983088983088983088 Algerians died (although this number according to

some accounts represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead)1048631 Te

stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact

that when Boucharebrsquos film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 983090983088983089983088 riot policehad to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences under-

stood as the filmrsquos biased and prejudicial account of the events in Seacutetif

For the purposes at hand then what happened in Seacutetif 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

againstmdashand not in defense ofmdasha population that was also ostensibly governed un-

der Francersquos authority and flag even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the

rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry Shortly after the Seacutetif massacre French forces

would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches oftheir empire in the First Indochinese War or what is sometimes called the French-

Vietnamese War (983089983097983092983094ndash983089983097983093983092) Te brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at

Dien Bien Phu in May 983089983097983093983092mdashsignificantly for France and its militaries the same

year the Algerian War of Independence officially beganmdashmarked 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

Te official declaration of the Algeriansrsquo militarized demands for independence

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983145 983150

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983145 983150

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983150

983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983145 983150

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983150

983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 22: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

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983150

983093

would not come until 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 even though these demands had been long in

the making1048632 Te Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 983089983097983093983092 un-

til 983089983097983094983090 not only between the French army and the Algerian Armeacutee de libeacuteration na-

tionale (983105983116983118) and Front de libeacuteration nationale (983110983116983118) 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 lrsquoarmeacutee secregravete (983119983105983123) Te 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 ldquopost- warrdquo Tus 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 ldquopost- warrdquo 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 Te Algerian War of Independence is

also pivotal as a litmus test for the statersquos imposition of the law as a means to denymdashrather then ensuremdashsuch 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 983091 April 983089983097983093983093 almost a year after the declaration of Algerian in-

dependence by the 983110983116983118 that the French National Assembly voted to approve a lawthat would allow for the declaration of a ldquostate of emergencyrdquo Tis 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 ldquoSpecial Powersrdquo in 983089983097983093983094 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 983089983091 May

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983145 983150

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983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983150

983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983145 983150

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983150

983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983150

983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983094

983089983097983093983096 in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom

they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropolersquos vacillation regarding the

maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of Francersquos geopo-

litical territory Tis 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-agrave-vis the populations that the state was meant to ldquorepresentrdquo 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

Tis book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contes-

tatory device and culture as normalizing control meetmdashliterally in the physical space

of Paris It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range ofFrench visual practices during the 983089983097983092983088s 983089983097983093983088s and 983089983097983094983088s 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 Seacutetif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independencenecessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modali-

ties of public belonging that the war introduced Tis 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 earlymoments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been

achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies) Tis expanded history also

means keeping the experiences of the 983089983097983092983088smdash war genocide and occupation chief

among themmdashin view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would

come to be represented in later decades Tese 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 countryIn the context of the arguments that follow and in light of this expanded histori-

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983150

983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

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983154

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983141

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983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

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983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 24: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983095

cal view of what we might call the ldquolong 983089983097983093983088srdquo I should clarify that in the above

allusion to ldquosubaltern political agendasrdquo I mean to invoke both those of the colo-

nized populations of French empiremdashin this case mostly Algeriansmdashas 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 ldquosubalternrdquo therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha inhis essay ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 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 ldquoeliterdquo 1048633 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 statersquos articulation of public memory in the mid-983089983097983092983088s even though they also

maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations and evenas 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 representationmdashboth political and pictorial so to speakmdashit

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 howsuch elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories

of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they dependsup11048624 ldquoProvincial-

izing Francerdquo 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 mythmdashaccording to the logic of Barthesrsquos analysismdashas 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 ldquohistory 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 solidarityrdquo sup1sup1

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 examplemdash with good reason given the ideological articulation of French state-

craft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions

of modern subjectivitymdashmy interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge

significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured

over the past fifty yearssup1sup2 Following Chakrabartyrsquos challenge to ldquomake visiblerdquo thecollusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand

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983145 983150

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983150

983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983150

983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

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983150

983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

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983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983150

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983150

983096

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

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 realitiesof imperialism colonialism and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of

ldquoalternativerdquo modernities somewhat utopian Indeed the integrity of the French na-

tion as equivalent to the ldquohexagonrdquo 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 cultureHere 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 Tese in part are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he

insists we now recognize that ldquoevery nation is now transnational and diasporic Te

crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders

as inside Te distant the elsewhere and the here-at-home meetrdquo sup1sup3 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 Tis 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 ldquoAlgerianrdquo maker or a ldquoFrenchrdquo one as also always subject to the trans-

national conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced byit As much as France is the target of this bookrsquos analysis then so too is the model

of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-statersquos 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 otherwisemdashFrench Algerian pied-noir Jewishmdash within

the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances

forged after the end of the Second World War indeed ldquoafter Seacutetifrdquo were the result of

actions and agents that until now we have not been able to see within the purview

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983150

983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983150

983097

of art and visual cultural analyses of the period Tese actions cannot be dislodged

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 beendivvied 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 Te 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 perspectiveallows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualizemdashthat is

fundamentally reinterpretmdashthe assumptions about abstraction and figuration spec-

tacle and reality speech and text politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary pre-

occupation with this period

o 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 ldquopublic space of

appearancerdquomdashand which she like the other figures in this bookrsquos analysis abandonsto the world of menmdashsuch 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 spheresup11048628 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 o 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 ldquoinvisiblerdquoIn 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

o 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 Tus 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-twentieth century the phrase ldquodecolonizing artrdquo

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983150

983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

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983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983150

983089983088

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

word ldquodecolonizingrdquo 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 ldquodecolonizerdquo 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 Tis 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

Tis bookrsquos expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambi-

tion o 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 Te 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 o 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 Tus visualmdashand to a lesser degree auralmdashproduction istreated 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 beenmdashand continue to bemdashrepresented especially in-

sofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibilityFrom a Nation orn is written in three parts which roughly follow a chronology

from the mid-983089983097983092983088s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 983089983097983094983090

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 presentsup11048629 In addition

to their chronological order the three parts of this book correspond to three differ-

ent representational modalitiesmdashspace language and imagemdashand 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

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983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983089

exclusively on visual engagement Tat is to say each chapterrsquos analysis turns on un-

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 itsfilmic literary and spoken iterations and the third considers the photographic image

that haunts both of these first two categories

Part I ldquoFragments and Facades Andreacute Malraux and the Image of the Past as

the Future of the Presentrdquo grounds the bookrsquos assessment of public experience in an

analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under con-

sideration Tis 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 ashaving been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the

Vichy period (983089983097983092983088 to 983089983097983092983092) 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 Te first chapter ldquoFragments or Te Ends of

Photographyrdquo examines the mid-century ambitions to ldquorestorerdquo central Paris that

were articulated by Andreacute Malraux Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 983089983097983091983095ndash983089983097983093983089Refuting standard readings of Malrauxrsquos written work as simply an exemplum

of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the

museum andor photography this chapter defines instead what I call Malrauxrsquos ldquoam-

nesiac aestheticsrdquo Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually

enable when Malraux would become Francersquos first minister of culture (983089983097983093983097ndash983089983097983094983097) 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 Tis created what I call a ldquospace of silencerdquo which was

profoundly rooted in Malrauxrsquos 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

languagemdashin both its sonic and its visual propertiesmdash within the space of the city

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983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

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httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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983145 983150

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983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983090

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

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 Malrauxrsquos urban vision

placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imagi-nary and its relationship to the long dureacutee of the past In fact Malrauxrsquos model did

so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the

Algerian War of Independence Tese considerations constitute the material focus of

chapter 983090 ldquoFaccedilades or Te Space of Silencerdquo Here I suggest that Malrauxrsquos ldquoamne-

siac aestheticsrdquo inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort

to render invisible that would characterize the statersquos 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 ldquoBetween Resistance and Refusal Te Language of Art and

Its Publicsrdquo continues to assess the relationships between the 983089983097983092983088s and the early

983089983097983094983088smdashthat 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 983089983097983094983090 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-gardeproduction even as they attemptedmdashand often failedmdashto subvert the institutional

and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded In particular

chapter 983091 ldquoSonic Youth Sonic Space Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of De-

territorializationrdquo establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision

language and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late

983089983097983092983088s 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 workmdash

including poetry film and performancemdashproduced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism Te 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 ldquospatializedrdquo language that they

hoped would circumvent traditional languagersquos 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 Lettristsrsquo

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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983145 983150

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983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 30: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983091

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

efforts are addressed in relationship to Isoursquos film raiteacute de bave et drsquo eacuteterniteacute (reatise

on Drool and Eternity 983089983097983093983090) which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a

site of presumptive peace

By 983089983097983094983089 Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isoursquos representational

gambits had tried to remind viewers it was either metaphorically or by associationChapter 983092 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

Isoursquos Lettrism the fourth chapter ldquoLa France deacutechireacutee Te Politics of Represen-

tation and the Spaces In-Betweenrdquo turns to a more strictly conventional art prac-

tice It looks at deacutecollage a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces

away rather than adding them on Tis pictorial innovation was created in 983089983097983092983097 by

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villegleacute when they mounted an accumulation of van-dalized street posters onto canvas Tis chapter takes particular focus on La France

deacutechireacutee (orn Apart France) a 983089983097983094983089 exhibition of Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos deacutecollage

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 Tis leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and rep-

resentational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas 983089) the art objects

produced by the deacutecollagistes and 983090) the challenge that deacutecollage presented to thesemi-private space of the gallery I argue that Hainsrsquos and Villegleacutersquos 983089983097983094983089 installation

of deacutecollagesmdashculled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the

accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concernedmdashengages

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 anexplicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of

articulating an ldquoengagedrdquo 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

ldquopost- warrdquo 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

Te third and final part of the book ldquoReidentifications Seeing Citizens Being

Seenrdquo turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

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983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3136

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983092

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

first four chapters emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn

to see these practices as such o this end chapter 983093 ldquolsquoTe Eye of Historyrsquo Photo-

journalism Protest and the Manifestation of 983089983095 October 983089983097983094983089rdquo returns the reader to

the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malrauxrsquos ldquoaesthetics of amnesiardquo

Tis chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 983089983097983094983089 by tens ofthousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect

of police Maurice Paponsup11048630 Te 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 citymdashauthored so to speak by such ef-

forts to ldquosilencerdquo and to scotomize as suggested by Malrauxrsquos 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 ldquotakenrdquo by authorial agents I read them as an effort to make roomfor an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise

allotted to them Te 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 coreTe bookrsquos 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 Tis chapter focuses on the film Cacheacute (Hidden 983090983088983088983093) 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 Tis last chapter also examines a twelve-minute

digital video Europa 983090983088983088983093ndash983090983095 octobre (983090983088983088983094) directed by Daniegravele Huillet and Jean-

Marie Straub who drew on the tradition of the cineacutetracts circulated as models of left-

ist agitation in the 983089983097983094983088s Te 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 Te Algerian Annex by Dennis Adams as it was installed

at the Museacutee drsquoart moderne de la Ville de Paris in 983089983097983096983097 Tis analysis is underscored

from the point of view of 983090983088983088983093 which I argue was a momentous year in the history of

the ldquopostcolonyrdquo as Mbembe has defined it which is to say not at all as a place ldquoafterrdquo

or free from the effects of colonizationsup11048631 It was in 983090983088983088983093 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 ldquoLooking Past the State of Emergencyrdquo serves as a coda to

the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3236

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3336

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 32: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3236

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983093

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

looking and watching It also brings the bookrsquos arguments about the period of de-

colonization to bear on Francersquos 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 sciencesup11048632

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 andevaluation More than just a question of rhetoric to ldquodecolonize artrdquo 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 visualmdashand through the resulting politics of

publicness they all engendered or refusedmdashcolonizer and colonized fought a pitched

battle Te 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 visibilitymdashor what we might think of as percep-

tibilitymdashin this way this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the

myopic stronghold that Guy Debordrsquos construction of ldquothe spectaclerdquo as monocular

and unidirectional has long had over the periodrsquos analysis Instead this book spatial-

izes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen insisting upon its multiple andmaterial vantage points as sites of engaged political practice

Most of this bookrsquos writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that

some have referred to as ldquothe war on terrorrdquo and which others have decried as a ldquoper-

manentrdquo or ldquoperpetualrdquo warsup11048633 Te imperative to understand my work as a reader of

aesthetic objects in relationship to this warmdashas informed by the fact that I have lived

through and during itmdashhas motivated the work and the analysis I present here Over

the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s 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

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3336

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 33: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3336

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151 983140

983157 983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983089983094

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

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 thatblindness 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 futuremdashthat which is yet to comemdashif thedisaster were not that which does not come that which has put a stop to every

arrival o 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 seesup21048624

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 34: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3436

983090983090983089

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 983089983097983093983088s and

983089983097983094983088s was coincident with corresponds to erry Smithrsquos efforts to historicize the notion of

ldquocontemporaneityrdquo 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 Te Writing of the Disaster (LrsquoEacutecriture du deacutesastre ) passim

3 Tis 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 Grigsbyrsquos Extremities is exemplary

for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial con-

quest and slavery

4 Te 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 ldquosans nomrdquo (nameless)

although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many namesmdashevents operation

pacification rebellion revolution insurgencymdasheven if the effect is precisely the same

Regardless of the statersquos 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 983089983088

June 983089983097983097983097 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre drsquoAlgeacuterie In Algeria it is called both La guerre de libeacuteration nationale and La reacutevolution Algeacuterienne or Tawra Jazārsquoiriya in Arabic terms which both carry their own ideological baggage

See Blandine Grosjean ldquoLa France reconnaicirct qursquoelle a fait la lsquoguerrersquo en Algeacuterie Lrsquoassem-

bleacutee vote aujourdrsquohui un texte qui enterre le terme official drsquo lsquoopeacuterations de maintien de

lrsquoordrersquordquo Libeacuteration 983089983088 June 983089983097983097983097 wwwliberationfr I have chosen to use the term ldquoAlge-

rian War of Independencerdquo throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to dis-

tinguish the 983089983097983093983092ndash983089983097983094983090 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War Although it is not

conventional in English-language scholarship I note that calling it the ldquoAlgerian War of

Liberationrdquo would perhaps better reinscribe the Algeriansrsquo agency in both the fight and

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

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8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3536

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

983150

983090983090983090

its naming o this end there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in call-

ing the war the ldquoAlgerian Revolutionrdquo 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 ldquoindigegravenes rdquo I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as ldquoAlge-

riansrdquo and the European (and primarily French) populations as ldquosettlersrdquo 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 ldquoindigenous Algerianrdquo population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants

from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe See Clancy-Smith ldquoExoti-

cism Erasures and Absencesrdquo 983090983091 Specifics regarding the rights these various populations

enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters especially chapters 983092 and 983093 which focus

more specifically on the ldquoAlgerianrdquo populations in France during the Algerian War of

Independence itself

5 Hannoumrsquos designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of

ldquoFrance in Algeriardquo 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 ldquoalterna-

tiverdquo or ldquosimultaneousrdquo 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 For details on the massacre see Benot Massacres coloniaux 983089983097983092983092ndash983089983097983093983088 esp 983097ndash983091983094 and

Ruedy Modern Algeria 983089983092983097ndash983089983093983088 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 warrsquos timeline all the way back in fact to 983089983096983091983088 and

the Ottoman resistance to the French landing thereby attempting to ground the roots of

ldquoAlgerian-nessrdquo in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one Tis is the

story presented in the Museeacute 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 Museacutee de lrsquoarmeacutee

7 More specifically Colin de Verdiegravere also acknowledged that the massacre at Seacutetif was

an ldquoinexcusable tragedyrdquo See ldquoAlgerians Remember Massacres of 983089983097983092983093rdquo Washington Post 983097 May 983090983088983088983093 wwwwashingtonpostcom

8 Te date 983089 November 983089983097983093983092 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 983110983116983118 issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across

the region asking them to fight for the ldquorestoration of the Algerian statemdashsovereign

democratic and socialmdash within the framework of the principles of Islamrdquo Tis 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 Tis consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of

ldquoUn seul hero le peuple rdquo (A single hero the people) or ldquoLa reacutevolution par le peuple pour le people rdquo (Te revolution by the people for the people)

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089

Page 36: From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

8132019 From a Nation Torn by Hannah Feldman

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullfrom-a-nation-torn-by-hannah-feldman 3636

983150

983151

983156 983141 983155

983142 983151

983154

983156 983144

983141

983145 983150

983156 983154 983151

983140

983157

983139 983156 983145 983151

9831509 Guha ldquoOn Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial Indiardquo 983092983092

10 In his essay ldquoProvincializing Francerdquo Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon

the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabartyrsquos Provincializing Europe Postcolo-nial Tought and Historical Difference

11 Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe 983092983093

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 ldquoFigures of Multiplicityrdquo 983093983095

14 Arendt Te Human Condition 983089983097983097

15 In thinking 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 Mignolorsquos recent work on the ldquodecolonial optionrdquo especiallythe ldquoDecolonial Aestheticsrdquo manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at

Duke Universityrsquos Jameson Gallery in April 983090983088983089983089 See also Mignolo ldquoDelinkingrdquo

16 While the English-language prefers the word ldquodemonstrationrdquo to ldquomanifestationrdquo the

translation loses something important to the French ldquoManifestationrdquo efficiently suggests

the quality of ldquomaking manifestrdquo that is associated with the root term ldquomanifeste rdquo (mani-

festo) as both a political and an artistic genre Te English ldquodemonstrationrdquo 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 983090 and the use of the Alge-

rian ambitions for the same space

17 See Mbembe Notes on the Postcolony esp 983089983092ndash983089983093 wherein Mbembe describes the impos-

sibility of attributing ldquopost-rdquo coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory See

also 983089983088983090 where he describes the ldquopostcolonyrdquo in relationship to the ongoing challenges

orchestrated by ldquosocieties recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the

violence which the colonial relationship involvesrdquo It is this combined historical specificity

and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembersquos 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 983089983095983089ndash983089983095983091

19

Te phrase ldquowar on terrorrdquo first used by President George W Bush on 983090983088 September983090983088983088983089 announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al-Qaeda and any other

organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats In 983090983088983088983097 President Barack

Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term ldquoOverseas Contingency

Operationrdquo In 983090983088983089983091 he asked that the war however named be considered as over Te

politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibil-

ity in a book by Retort [Ian Boal J Clark Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]

Afflicted Powers

20 Blanchot Writing the Disaster 983089