'C’est comme ça qu’on fabrique des automobiles': Race, work, and colonial afterlives in Robert Linhart's L’Établi

Abstract

Robert Linhart's L’Établi recounts the author's experience of ‘établissement’ as a young Maoist militant in the months immediately following May ‘68. Ten years after leaving the École normale supérieure to work and politically organize at the Citroën automobile factory in Choisy, Linhart reflects on his experiences on the assembly line, and his attempts to organize an ultimately unsuccessful wildcat strike from within the factory. This article revisits L'Établi alongside Linhart's littlestudied critical writings on racism, imperialism, and capitalist production in order to foreground two interwoven, yet under-appreciated facets of the work, and Linhart's corpus more broadly: first, Linhart's critique of a dense racial and colonial logic which undergirded the division of labor and maintenance of orderly production in the factory despite the purported demise of the French Empire. And second, the his innovation as not just a political memoirist, but as an inventive literary strategist. To this end, this article focuses on the surprising movements of poetic effervescence which appear throughout L'Établi, which reveal themselves to be thoroughly interwoven with Linhart's anti-imperial, anti-capitalist project.