the Ivorian lawyer requested that American financial groups participate in the creation of a venture firm whose aim would be the exploitation of Ivorian natural resources.28
It is not clear how American Marshall planners responded to Maître Binzème’s proposals. Nor can we ascertain whether the French colonial authorities took notice of his correspondence with the Americans. Still, the attitude of the Ivorian lawyer crystallized a tendency visible throughout the larger French Empire in the postwar period: the nationalist politics of triangulating the development encounter and a rather voluntarist call for more Americanization. If modernization had indeed emerged as a transnational ideology that most people espoused, French colonial subjects increasingly came to doubt the modernizing capability of Paris and its imperial extension. In contrast to France’s mission civilisatrice, people like Kouamé Binzème were counterposing the potential benefits of the American way of life and the modernization theory that informed its expansion.
As would be confirmed repeatedly, the dangers inherent in the politics of triangulating modernization were not lost on the French colonial administrators. Their reaction, which came in the form of dubbing American modernization, if desperate, at least suggested that knowledge, translation, and comparativism had become transnational discursive forces in the postwar world of French imperialism, not unlike the doctrine of mise en valeur that informed the early French civilizing mission. How did this work out? Who implemented this effort at translation? What were its ultimate outcomes?
ENACTING THE POLITICS OF DUBBING
The architects of the ingenious effort at dubbing were the colonial administrators and their retinue of specialists, technicians, and experts. Given the decentralized nature of French colonial rule, the local administrators may have been the actual makers of much of French imperialism in Africa.29 But their commandement would have amounted to nothing had the colonial administrators not been able to rely on the counsels and even guidance of the colonial experts. During the early moments of the drive toward mise en valeur, for instance, geographers and engineers had to survey the newly acquired territories to make them legible for colonial rule. In a similar vein, military engineers had to build roads, railways, bridges, and canals while doctors and medical biologists were making sure the outre-mer was free from debilitating germs and diseases. Without these efforts, the realization of the project of mise en valeur would have proved elusive. After the Second World War, this pattern of collaboration between science, technology, and colonial rule was maintained and extended with the addition of the dubbing of American modernization theory by colonial experts.
Even while the war was still raging, American diplomats had anticipated that a US-led global market economy would be the basis for any reconstruction efforts. In this regard, Washington economic planners designed programs to boost productivity around the world in an attempt to bridge the postwar “dollar gap” and the wider trade imbalance between the United States and its European partners.30 Typically, the planners believed that the reconstruction of Europe and the stability of the wider world were untenable unless foreign governments managed their economies according to the dictates of consumer capitalism. To this end, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) brought thousands of visitors to the United States to expose them to American modernity in the hope that they would replicate an American model of development once they returned to their home countries.31
Among these visitors, French officials and executives numbered in the thousands. Between 1949 and 1956, some 335 French missions went to the United States, totaling around 3,700 people.32 As a rule, the French travelers wanted to learn about the “causes and methods of American high productivity.”33 The more enthusiastic members of French delegations used the opportunity of the transatlantic voyage to initiate critical self-examinations of their own society.34 At the same time, many productivity missionaries struggled to adapt the American gospel to the realities of metropolitan France.35
The job of the French colonial administrators and experts who visited the United States was even more complicated. With anticolonial nationalism on the rise, one mission proposal suggested, the colonial administrators had to minimize the time-consuming process of trial and error inherent to development practice. It went on to argue that the focus should be on speeding up colonial productivity by the introduction of American machinery.36 This proposal was confirmed in subsequent reports. For instance, after his second month touring the United States, P. Labrousse concluded that while a “tremendous work of verification” would be needed, it was “more likely that we would end up trying some of the machines in our pilot regions.”37 Saint Hippolite adopted the same position when he argued that France had no other option but to “bring some [American machines] to our possessions.”38 A few colonial scientists joined the missionary wave. Such was the case of the Ivory Coast–based Hubert Moulinier, who spent four months in the United States studying agronomic issues. At the end of his visit, the chef de travaux de laboratoires returned to West Africa convinced that many American methods, if adapted judiciously, could improve the productivity of such tropical cash crops as coffee and cocoa.39
The United States did not provide leadership to the French only in the field of agronomy. The French envoys also looked up to such American social experiments as race relations, from which they surprisingly hoped to draw lessons for the outre-mer. In fact, even though French scholars were among the inventors of “race” as an anthropological category in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, French political and cultural elites came to shun discussion of race in twentieth-century France. Rather, they claimed race was an American problem. This myth of a color-blind France attracted many African Americans to the Hexagon.40 Yet a racialist unconscious haunted French society as a whole, which was revealed at the time of France’s embrace of US technoculture. If anything, the claim that social conditions in the overseas territories were closer to the United States (because of the presence of blacks) than metropolitan France betrayed the belief that race indeed mattered to some French decision makers. Already in their discussion of what telecommunication equipment to procure in the US, colonial authorities in France observed what they believed was a similarity in land-use patterns between certain American southern regions and Africa.41
Yet it was in their observations on housing and hygiene that the racialist unconscious became obvious. Revealingly, one administrator claimed that the existence of blacks in the American South made it imperative for the productivity missionaries to visit this part of the United States. Another administrator suggested that the mission on overseas equipment would have to study both the “adaptation of whites to special living conditions (in terms of housing, climate, and interactions with backward [peu évolué] natives) and training as well as adaptation of a backward labor force to mechanized work.”42 Implicit in these recommendations was the belief that African Americans shared the status of corps d’exception with France’s colonial subjects in Africa. Furthermore, by insisting on a study of interactions between blacks and whites in the United States, the French colonial administrators suggested that successful race relations were part and parcel of the modernization package.43
Not all colonial authorities had to make the transatlantic voyage in order to be exposed to American developmental know-how. Sometimes they could have their share of American modernity mediated through Paris. For instance, at the end of the mission on gold mining, Mr. Philippe asked various French overseas institutions to let him know the number of copies of the final report they would need. Many of the institutions in charge of the outre-mer, including the Haut Commisariat d’AOF and the Office de la Recherche Scientifique Outre-Mer (ORSOM), responded promptly.44 In other instances, American development missionaries carried out the reverse voyage overseas to train French colonial managers. For example, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) sent a US cotton geneticist to French Africa, while another American expert was lent to French colonial authorities to train them in American techniques of mechanical rice harvesting.45 Despite the suspicion of some colonial administrators, a number of French institutions in charge of overseas affairs actively sought this type of cooperation. Such was the case of
