From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing art and representation in France, 1945–1962 by Hannah Feldman, and: The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian families and the French welfare state during decolonization by Amelia Lyons (review)

Over the past decade, it has become increasingly difficult to consider the history of postwar metropolitan France without acknowledging the role that France’s colonies played in its transformation. The importance of Algeria, which was legally considered to be an integral part of France, has received particular attention in this literature as historians have tried to account for the entangled histories of modernization, decolonization, immigration, and European integration. The works by Hannah Feldman and Amelia Lyons both seek to continue this line of inquiry, asking: How did the presence of Algerians on French soil and the Algerian War influence the political possibilities in the metropole? Moreover, how were these subjects rendered visible to the larger body politic? In addressing the legacy of decolonization in France, the authors treat two quite disparate topics. Amelia Lyons investigates how the French welfare state tackled questions of racial and cultural difference as it created a new set of institutions that aimed to provide Algerians in France with social services. Hannah Feldman, on the other hand, investigates how the “decades of decolonization” engendered a new nexus of cultural production, political expression, and national belonging through a study of aesthetic practices.

The notion of decolonization has been particularly fraught in the Algerian case, where an insistence that Algeria was an integral part of France led many to view the conflict as a civil war in the 1950s. In fact, these violent years once referred to as a “war without a name” have given way to a historiography that centers on the collective amnesia regarding the violence and aftermath of the Algerian War. Following in that direction, Lyons and Feldman are both concerned with accounting for how Algerians were erased from the historical record. Feldman interrogates the visual practices that attempted to substitute a universal “humanity” in place of a “failed colonial project,” while Lyons highlights the tension between the French state, which sought to make “the Algerian problem literally disappear,” and the agency of Algerians who refused “to be invisible by making demands for a better life” (160).

Yet against this backdrop of colonialism and visibility, the question of what one means by decolonization lingers. Both authors draw from Todd Shepard’s important work on the “invention” of decolonization in 1962, but their work shows how the meaning of decolonization itself remains up for grabs—even at a point at which the field has definitively come into its own. Feldman notes that her use of the word “decolonizing” in the title is tied to the fact that it is both an adjective and a verb. Put differently, the term signals both a “historical contest” (between colonized and colonizer) as well as our own struggles as researchers to reject colonial ways of reading (or seeing) our sources. Lyons has a more standard understanding of decolonization as a historical period, but it is worth noting that both authors start their studies in the immediate postwar period, thus expanding the temporal frame of decolonization and providing a lens for understanding the continuities between the Fourth and Fifth Republics.

Feldman begins her monograph by specifying that she is interested in the movement of decolonization that was unleashed by the massacre at Sétif in 1945. This periodization helps her to situate her first chapter, which examines the French writer and first minister of cultural affairs, André Malraux, in light of the concerns that emerged out of the Second World War. His Voices of Silence, a series of essays interjected with photographic reproductions, was published in 1951 and echoed the “dehistoricizing impulse” of the Fourth Republic (36). Malraux’s conviction that images could circulate independently from any historical or geographical context was the result of an aesthetic...