complicates the traditional narrative on the transnational circulation of knowledge since the beneficiaries of the Orstomian knowledge spillover were not exclusively the Ivorians. A critical engagement with the multiple sites and archives of Ivory Coast’s modernization élan will make this ever more evident.
METHOD, SOURCES, AND VISIONS FOR A NEW HISTORY
With the present trend to internationalize the historical study of Africa, a resort to multiarchival research to explore the Ivorian miracle should not come as a surprise. The interactive global context of Cold War development projects analyzed in this book also makes my study a multisited and translocal endeavor. In a sense, this should be obvious, especially if one remembers that US relations with Ivory Coast had ramifications for US relations with France. The triangular (and even multilateral) character of US relations with former French colonies in a Cold War context has been aptly demonstrated. More specifically, historically minded scholars who have embraced an international history approach to study postwar developmentalism have revealed that US-led modernization efforts in the Global South antagonized the interests of the European (colonial) powers.50
Departing from this scholarly literature on postwar modernization and Americanization that largely focuses on Latin America and Asia, I argue that the export of American developmental precepts affected (post)colonial Francophone Africa as well, even though the process itself was mediated through France. I show that the promise of American-style modernization provided an opportunity for anticolonial nationalists to triangulate the relationship between Ivory Coast and France beginning in the late 1940s. The ensuing politics of triangulation allowed the Americans to insert themselves into the seemingly tight filial bond between Ivory Coast and France. This new trilateral political configuration contributed to the delegitimization of the French colonialist mission, forcing colonial officials and scholars, and later French postcolonial diplomats, development workers, and social scientists, to resort to what I call “dubbing,” the process by which American-inflected models of development were seemingly translated into French ideas and policies. While it opened new spaces for negotiation, the competition between the French and the Americans also produced a schizophrenic dynamic in the implementation of modernization projects during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.51
My resort to a multisited approach is motivated less by the dynamics of the international situation (or even the triangular nature of my project) than by the way I conceive of development—the phenomenological object/process of my inquiry. Specialists in various fields of the social sciences have defined the concept in terms of national prosperity, alleviation of poverty, and increased purchasing power for individuals; all of which points to what has been aptly called the “secular telos of material redemption.”52 Without discarding this materialist perspective altogether, I want to regard development as a nexus of moral discourses and a set of social practices traversed by multiple temporalities. There were certainly at stake the material objectives of increasing capital investment, transferring technology, and achieving economic well-being through the “rational” exploitation of the environment; goals in which the perceptive observer can see the influence of the so-called European Enlightenment to which postwar development is discursively linked through colonialism.53 But one might also see the temporality of American modernization theory, which, as a particular variation of and a carrier of a distinctive vision of modernity, was mobilized to achieve ecosocial changes as well as checkmate the spread of communism. It was largely this variation of modernity/development (along with the tools to achieve it) that was institutionalized in the World Bank and other agencies of the post-1945 new world order.54 Finally, one can see in the developmentalist ethos of the late twentieth century the temporalities of local politics that have so well been mapped out in the critical ethnographies of development.55
Building on the pioneering works of historians of development and the insights of such anthropologists as Arjun Appadurai, Emily Martin, and George Marcus, I posit development packaging as a commodity-like object whose social/cultural life should be explored at the various sites of its production, mediation, and consumption.56 Much like Martin in her analysis of immunity in American culture, I have deliberately crossed “back and forth across the borders between the institutions in which scientists produce knowledge [. . .] and the wider [Ivorian] society,” which was supposed to receive the benefits of progress in the form of modernization.57 This translocal approach complicates our understanding of the US Cold War development initiatives toward Ivory Coast, for it demonstrates that development was much more than the material and supposedly moral transformation of a society according to a hegemonic French or American model. In fact, it suggests that it is through the mapping and analysis of dialogues among experts, diplomats, bureaucrats, local brokers, and the general population that we will come to a more profound understanding of late twentieth-century modernity.58
As part of my effort to make this translocal research approach more efficient, I interviewed people who planned, enforced, witnessed, and underwent the discipline inherent in the implementation of development projects. These oral histories enabled me to “read” written sources, both archival and published, in new ways. In fact, I used a mass of diplomatic records and official policy papers for an appreciation of the moral/ethical foundation of policy making, and the press and academic literature for the formulation of opinions, then and now. Opting to use news stories and scholarly articles as performative speech acts along with official records and oral interviews finds its justification in the ubiquitous presence of these journalistic, scholarly, and even popular sources in the archives and personal papers of many a policy maker.59
These uses of written and oral sources, and the deployment of an interdisciplinary approach, have allowed me to provide a fresh perspective on the history of developmentalism in the wake of the Cold War. In the last decade or so, there has been an explosion of historical studies that focus attention on American involvement in modernization efforts in various parts of the world to undercut the appeal of Soviet internationalism. Others have shown that the Soviet Union and even communist China attempted similar transnational modernization efforts to make friends.60 By zooming in on the case of America’s role in Ivorian modernization drives, the book reminds us that places receiving US-inflected modernization packages were hardly blank slates. Rather, they had a long history of engagement with modernity—whether in its precolonial manifestations, colonial guise, or otherwise. The narrative recounted here suggests that local actors in Ivory Coast constantly used the unwritten script of such a longer history of engagement with cosmopolitanism, along with their embodied memories of the modern, to “domesticate” foreign development assistance in the twentieth century. Here, then, as never before, the “glocal” characteristics of modernity become manifest.
MAIN ARTICULATIONS OF THE BOOK
To substantiate the claims sketched out above, I have divided African Miracle, African Mirage into three parts that are largely (but not exclusively) chronological and thematic. Titled “The Postwar Years,” part 1 (chapters 1 and 2) focuses on the years between 1946 and 1960. It is set in the context of the rise of the American Century, the emerging Cold War, transformations in the colonial rule of European powers, and decolonization. It highlights the roots/routes of the Ivorian miracle by underlining the importance of the African-led cash-crop revolution in its unfolding. This section also demonstrates the role of the postwar modernization drive and how such socioeconomic phenomenon was informed by an American-inflected modernization theory. Part 2, “The Decade of Development” (chapters 3–5), sheds light on the changes that followed the cascade of independence proclamations in the 1960s. It demonstrates the difficulty for the leaders of the newly independent Ivory Coast to overcome the legacy of late colonialism and the appeal of postwar modernization theory, even as they initiated a nation-building strategy based on regional planning. To support
