| Sumario: | This article explores the incident at Sousse, a conflict in mid-1930s French Tunisia in which a security force of West African troops launched an unauthorized attack against the city's residents. Developing a microhistorical approach to the conflict, the study analyzes how a range of colonial as well as anticolonial actors exploited the complex racial animosities that emerged from using "foreign" auxiliary troops—West African soldiers as well as legionnaires—to police the Tunisian protectorate. In various ways Muslim residents, European settlers, Tunisian nationalists, and colonial authorities all drew from racialized discourses of Blackness, Frenchness, and foreignness to denigrate West African troops, spurring those soldiers to enact colonial violence to reclaim their military honor. By deconstructing the incident at Sousse, the article argues that the very racial categories and animosities so deeply embedded in structures of colonial policing could prove highly disruptive in the context of everyday governance. At one level a local study focused on the collision of racialized discourses, this research also sheds light on the contradictory articulation of racial hierarchy and imperial power, as well as how colonized peoples—Tunisian Muslims and West African soldiers—undermined and challenged that power.
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