the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled versions. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth.
—Jean Baudrillard, America (1986)
The availability of French-dubbed U.S. products is determined by their marketability first in France. If an American program has not been dubbed for use in France, it is not available to French-speaking Africa.
—Floyd M. Land, “Television, Culture, and the State” (1990)
IN THE WAKE of the opening of the Vridi Canal, many observers had predicted that Ivory Coast would become an economic powerhouse; a new hub in West Africa likely to attract businesses and investors within and without the French Empire.1 Few had imagined, however, that the territory would turn into a source of political strain between France and the United States. In hindsight and within the larger framework of transatlantic relations, historians have demonstrated that such Franco-American tensions over the colonies were unavoidable, especially given a strong strand of anti-Americanism in French culture, the perception that the United States was fundamentally anticolonialist, and the fact that the modernity many Ivorian elite were aspiring to was heavily inflected by American ideals of the good life.2
As early as 1948, French writer Georges Soria had articulated the anxiety many of his compatriots felt about their country’s postwar relationship with the United States. His book, which appeared at a time when French communists were denouncing the “Marshallization” of their patrie, echoed the already widespread resentment of the French elite over asymmetrical Franco-American cooperation.3 In a context marked by an unprecedented affirmation of American hegemony on a global scale, the concerns of the French were actually shared by a substantial number of Europeans who invariably saw American-led reconstruction of war-torn Europe as a clever means set up by the Americans to erode their lifestyles and worldviews. Consequently they decided to act, if not popularly, then at least with a populist rhetoric. To provide resistance against what Georges Duhamel had prophesied during the interwar years as the slow diffusion of the American way of life into the world was therefore the aim of the anti-US mobilization that spanned political affiliations.4
I argue in this chapter that French colonial administrators and experts—a substantial number of whom went to the United States as productivity missionaries—had a much more difficult task in appropriating American modernization precepts. In the face of mounting anticolonial nationalism led by the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) and especially its Ivorian branch—the Parti Démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), not only did they have to find ways to uphold the myth of a modern and civilized France before their colonial subjects, but they also had to acknowledge the hollowness of their mission civilisatrice compared to the American modernization paradigm: hence the politics of dubbing, that is, the project and process aimed at translating and adapting for their colonial subjects development concepts and techniques that largely emanated from the United States. A subtle yet still paternalistic trick, the politics of dubbing ensured that French colonial administrators and experts would remain the hegemonic mediators between American modernity and the indigenous people of the newly created Union Française. In other words, by attempting to suppress the historically constituted “American-ness” of postwar developmentalism, the French colonial state and its managers aimed to brand themselves as the sole providers of progress and the “good life” to their colonial subjects.
This chapter looks at the outcomes of such political acts of seduction as it focuses on the efforts at technopolitical translation and their conditions of possibility. It argues that the spatial extent of the process of exporting American development techniques, values, and ways of being was not restricted to the European, Latin American, and Asian landscapes. Even more interesting, I suggest that the coming of American modernity in colonial Ivory Coast opened a new space for the emerging nationalist leaders who used the opportunity to triangulate the relationship of their society with metropolitan France. The subsequent trilateral politics that came in the wake of the American Century created or deepened extant chaos within the French Empire. Such conjuncture ultimately forced colonial authorities to resort to dubbing modernization in a last effort to bolster the weakening imperial ties. If the politics of dubbing and the efforts at infrastructural development were meant to help roll back the nationalist/anticolonial tide in the French Empire, they failed—especially since the colonial state was equally unable to reconcile the demands of younger African activists who wanted immediate independence and their seniors who dreamed of a supra Franco-African nation. On the other hand, Raymond Cartier and other metropolitan French Rightist opinion leaders were calling on the end of colonialism because it was a drain on France’s resources. By the mid-1950s, the signs pointed to the fact that Ivorians (and Africans in general) were snatching the initiative locally and that decolonization had become irreversible.5
COLONIAL MODERNIZATION IN THE WAKE OF AMERICANIZATION
With very few exceptions, historians of American expansionism in the twentieth century have rarely anchored their investigations in Africa’s past, let alone inquired into the African ramifications of the rise of the United States as a global hegemon. Instead, Latin America, Canada, Western Europe, and Asia have customarily been the focus of much scholarship on the extension and ultimate globalization of US soft power.6 To a certain degree, this scholarly fixation has meant that the spread of the American dream and the faith in consumer capitalism on a global scale have operated within a certain, if narrowly defined, geography of market attractiveness, consumer behavior, and knowledge that American firms and marketers have mustered about the rest of the world.7
In contrast with such a view, this chapter offers that such a relatively marginal territory as Ivory Coast was not outside the purview and circulatory reach of American products after the Second World War. My aim is not only to track how the coming of American modernity was perceived by both colonial subjects and imperial rulers but also to pay close attention to the particular logics of subaltern engagements with Americanization in a colonial Francophone context. As will become apparent later, only then will we be able to ascertain whether the sociopolitical actions of the French administrators and their colonial subjects in the Ivorian territory merely replicated the disputation and populist politics that targeted the so-called “Marshallization” of postwar society in metropolitan France.
By dislodging Europe’s “old regime of consumption” and replacing its “ethics of distinction” with an ethics geared toward service, America’s market empire certainly proved itself to be, according to Victoria de Grazia, an “irresistible” force.8 Following the work of Kristin Ross, we have a better understanding of how Americanization and decolonization reordered metropolitan culture in postwar France.9 France’s dependencies and overseas territories were not spared the social and cultural restructuring that the rise of a hegemonic US emporium/imperium orchestrated throughout the world. From the postwar architectural ventures in Morocco’s premier international city of Casablanca to US cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia, American informal imperialism, indeed, shied away from no barrier, except perhaps the various “curtains” of the Cold War. Even then, American policy makers and Cold War strategists sought to expand the reach of a US-dominated “Free World” and its irresistible consumerist ethics everywhere, even in kitchens in the Soviet Union.10
There is evidence that the coming of American consumer durables into colonial Ivory Coast predated the postwar rise of the United States as an international leader in the provision of cheap industrial products to the world.11 Still, the adoption or at least admiration of American consumption patterns by the Ivorian évolués occurred only after the Second World War, when rapid urbanization, consumer euphoria, and an oversupply of equipment made Ivory Coast a prime site for the expansion of America’s market empire in French West Africa. Such was the case because French residents in the territory had begun, despite lagging behind their peers in metropolitan France, to conspicuously display their newfound modernity in the form of imported refrigerators,
