Maureen G. Shanahan  (James Madison University)
Canvassing Colonial Trauma in Fernand Léger's War Memories

French artist Fernand Léger developed his ideas about class and nation out of his experience of the Great War, where he claimed he encountered the "French nation." But this experience was also a profoundly traumatic experience that "divided his life in two," and it was simultaneously an encounter with the colonial subject, notably Senegalese and Moroccans. I argue that Léger's conception of nationality was always already fractured and unstable, never fully coherent, and, like the features of trauma, constituted through partial and layered memories, disavowal, and displacement. Two paintings in particular, La Partie de cartes (1917) and Les Trois Camarades (1920), each use a three-person grouping to represent a collective of soldiers and veterans, respectively. Yet the cubist visual language of these paintings negates ideas of a coherent, stable, or harmonious union and instead enacts the complexity of memories about the war. The presence of a fez-wearing veteran in Les Trois Camarades invests the colonial subject with ideas about the war's damage to bodies and psyches, thus positioning the image at the interstices of theories about shell shock and trauma as formative of collective identity (LaCapra, Micale, Roudenbush) and theories about traumatic impact of slavery and colonialism (Franon, Césaire). This paper will explore the tensions between the memories of war and the disavowal of the trauma of war and colonialism as they emerge throughout Léger's work. Léger's representation of the colonial subject serves as far more than an example of primitivism's relation to modernism, as sometimes discussed (e.g. Clifford) regarding the set designs for the Ballet Suédois production, La Création du monde (1924). I argue that the frequency with which the colonial subject appears in Léger's writing and picture-making points to complex and shifting ideas about the "primitive" Other overlaid with attitudes about national formation, trauma and regeneration. The colonial subject sometimes appears as a worker-contributor to national reconstruction as in Le Chauffeur nègre (1919), sometimes as an eroticized and generative female body, sometimes as an index of the contested passage through port cities as in the Plongeurs series of the 1940s, and sometimes as a revolutionary as in his designs for the opera, Simon Bolívar (1950). Given the wealth of references to the colonial subject among his laborers, veterans, and revolutionaries, the paper will thus explore the question of what did Léger "know" about the trauma of colonialism?