African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast (New African Histories)

Description

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was once touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. On the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of unusual people. To some degree, Amin’s criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed.

In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba contains economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast lately. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not continuously seen in histories of development. In the end, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently brand new” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests throughout the context of an ever-globalizing world.

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