From a Nation Torn

"Hannah Feldman's book is a masterpiece of historical inquiry that fundamentally restructures our view of French society after 1945, banning the term postwar as a descriptor of that period. France was nothing but at war until 1962, first in Indochina, then in Algeria, and Feldman offers a radically new analysis of the impact those colonial wars had on its culture—from Malraux's musée imaginaire and grandiose plan to renovate Paris to the literary and filmic production of the Lettristes, the activities of the décollagistes, or that of photojournalists braving state censorship. A tour de force."—Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study
“One of the most innovative aspects of Feldman’s approach lies in the fact that many of the cultural artefacts examined in From a Nation Torn have, until this point, been defined in largely ahistorical and apolitical terms, despite making an often explicit reference to decolonization. . . . [T]his is an undeniably excellent cultural analysis of an often overlooked period in France’s national history.” -- Mani Sharpe * Modern and Contemporary France *
"This intriguing book is the product of deep and detailed archival research into the artistic, cultural, social, and political situation of the Algerian War, revealing with engaging precision the extreme complexity of its representation in public broadcast media, its profound impact on French intellectual life, the cultural activism it precipitated, not least in conceptions of citizenship and in city planning, and above all its deep resonance within the most significant visual arts ideas and practices of the period, including André Malraux's aesthetics, Isodore Isou's lettrisme, and the Nouveaux réalistes."—Terry Smith, coeditor of Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity
“This is a history that traces why we remain unable to see the very parameters that have delimited the sphere of the visual to bracket out the experience, even the existence, of specific subaltern populations. Feldman makes an unassailable case for the urgency of this project. . . . Her book is a dense and powerful intervention into how we are to comprehend art in this period in France and the contours of modernism more generally, offering an invaluable resource for our efforts to understand the function of the image and to write about it within our present ‘globalized’ economy and endless ‘war on terror.’” -- Megan R. Luke * Art Bulletin *
"Feldman’s book (a first book!) is perhaps one of the strongest studies on French modernism in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s that I have ever read, and one that, definitely, will change our thinking on arts, culture, nation, and postcolonialism in the postwar period. It does not only achieve a real paradigm shift in our long standing vision of that kind of modernism (actually the leap of France into the world of mass consumption), it also engages in a highly challenging debate with some major thinkers in the field of visual culture." -- Jan Baetens * Leonardo Reviews *
"From a Nation Torn is extraordinarily rich in compelling observations.... Feldman stakes her territory and brilliantly succeeds in it.... From a Nation Torn will be indispensable reading for all scholars who wish to contribute to an adequate history of the era formerly known as postwar." -- Daniel Spaulding * Art Journal *
“Scholars interested in visual culture generally and modernism, colonial resistance, and subaltern art production in particular will benefit greatly from a close reading of From a Nation Torn. As scholars take note of the stakes masterfully outlined by Hannah Feldman and bring them out of France and into former colonies, including Algeria, hopefully the nuance and theoretical rigor applied in this book will also find application in future acts of decolonial looking.” -- Michelle Huntingford Craig * African Arts *
“What Feldman proposes is a decolonized model of looking that remains alert to what might not be immediately visible. This model involves looking past the mechanisms of bourgeois cunning to see certain realities that have been obfuscated. Feldman’s work is prescriptive, which is often seen as contradictory to historical practice, but hers is a strong challenge to the very sources of power that historians, too, are keen to condemn.” -- Sung Eun Choi * History *
“Feldman’s book serves as a lens to correct our myopia regarding this period, allowing us to retrain our eyes to contextualize and analyse contemporaneous visual production and the public that created or participated in it in a more comprehensive way. For that substantial achievement alone, it deserves to be read widely by scholars of French and francophone studies, as much as by art historians.” -- Elizabeth Geary Keohane * French Studies *
"In its dynamic analysis of an imaginative and often unexpected range of media, artists and audiences, From a Nation Torn achieves its aim to ‘decolonize art’ by moving beyond canonical understandings of modernism. Simultaneously, it sheds fascinating light on an understudied aspect of global history." -- Claire Wintle * Visual Studies *