An Inconvenient Expertise

In: French politics, culture and society, Band 37, Heft 1, S. 117-138

Abstract

In the 1950s, French shipping companies began to replace their old
fleet of steamships with new diesel ships. They also began to lay off sailors
from French Africa, claiming that the changing technology rendered their
labor obsolete. The industry asserted that African sailors did not have the
aptitude to do other, more skilled jobs aboard diesel vessels. But unemployed
colonial sailors argued differently, claiming that they were both able and
skilled. This article explores how unemployed sailors from French Africa cast
themselves as experts, capable of producing technological knowledge about
shipping. In so doing, they shaped racialized and gendered notions about
labor and skill within the French empire. The arguments they made were
inconvenient, I argue, because colonial sailors called into question hegemonic
ideas about who could be modern and who had the right to participate
in discourse about expertise.