Jordanna Matlon
Biographic Data
| ID | 108363 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jordanna Matlon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jordanna |
| FAMILY NAME | Matlon |
| SIGNATURE | MATLON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | American University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3632-0930 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 128 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Author Response to British Journal of Sociology Symposium for a Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism
I am immensely grateful to John Solomos, Tanisha Spratt, and Gala Rexer for their insightful and brilliant engagement with my book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism. My response will proceed as follows. I will begin with a summary of my book that highlights elements of relevance to the reviews. I will then elaborate particular points in conversation with my interlocutors. First, I will discuss my applica…
Book symposium: Men, masculinities and Southern urbanism
This book symposium is a multilogue on four books Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of Being a Man in an African City, by Mario Schmidt; City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, by Romit Chowdhury; Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony, by Shannon Philip; and A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism…
On Shifting Ground: Constructing Manhood on the Margins
Tapping imaginaries: Guinness, masculinity, and the promise of Africa Rising
This article interrogates masculinity and the consumer politics of late capitalism in urban Africa. Engaging scholarship on racialized masculinities, branding, and African cities with special attention to the Nigerian context, it conducts a media analysis of three Guinness Africa advertising campaigns: Made of More, Michael Power, and Greatness. Building off of its centuries-long ties between the African male consumer and European capital, in 199…
Ten Theses of Racial Capitalism
An Ethnography of Racial Capitalism’s Long Crisis: A Reply
Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man
Acculturation as Evolution
This chapter discusses the consequences after the colonial economy of civilized wage labor became the “formal” economy upon independence. Despite always constituting the bulk of the urban labor market, informal activities were feminized and made incongruous for masculine identity. The chapter draws on this framework to establish how the évolué shaped modern Abidjanais masculinity. It then explores how the French civilizing mission, or mission civ…
VIP Imaginaries
This chapter explores peripheral Abidjan—the streets and intersections where vendors peddled their goods and the leisure spaces and social worlds where they escaped the stigma of their trade. Vending was a marginalizing activity designated outside the realm of work and deemed inappropriate for men and citizens. To contend with this stigma, the chapter looks at how vendors employed coping strategies from denial to resignification. It emphasizes ho…
Reflections on Intersections/Infrastructure
This chapter explores the politics of the author's positionality in the field. It reflects on the author's fieldwork experiences with Abidjanais men. It also considers how the author's identity as an African American woman entailed for them a direct encounter with elsewhere: an imagined global conceived simultaneously as a space of creativity, possibility, and disillusionment. The chapter highlights how the friction of the ethnographic encounter …
Tropes of Black Masculinity
This chapter shows the French West African évolué and the Black Atlantic media icon as the two tropes that constitute idealized masculinities for Abidjanais men. It documents the hegemonic order of racial capitalism to trace the means by which capitalism situates Black labor, and how accordant imaginaries of Blackness structure the social order and legitimize domination. The chapter also interrogates value creation in racial capitalism, attentive…
The Evolution of the Wage Labor Ideal
This chapter tracks the evolution of the wage labor ideal in French West Africa from the slave economy to the breadwinning family wage at the moment of independence. It reveals how colonization offered the privileges of whiteness to a stratum of African évolué men. The chapter also traces the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism from slavery and colonial subjugation to the postwork economy. It argues that Blackness has been symbo…
La Crise
This chapter starts with a discussion on how ideological moments of Blackness are refracted through the Black male body—laboring or not—in the city, the locus of capitalist modernity in Africa. The chapter recounts a period of economic stasis, protracted civil war, and political interregnum, precipitated by the debt crisis and the fall of commodity prices. Abidjan entered the twenty-first century with nearly 75 percent of its working-age populati…
Imaginaries of Affirmation
This chapter looks at the emergence of the Black Atlantic as a self-referential category, and examines how it has played an important role in vindicating difference outside the register of whiteness. Tasked with subverting the most visible tools of negation, the chapter explores how the imaginaries of affirmation forged connections and borrowed across oceans to reinvent the meaning of Africanity and to transform the reified Black body into an ess…
Imaginaries of Negation
This chapter provides a historical account of labor from colonialism to la crise in the African city with an emphasis on Abidjan. It complements the colonial past and present by tracing lineages of Black Atlantic imaginaries. The chapter sketches the incorporation of Blackness in racial capitalism to analyze its multiple and dialectical potentialities: as negation and in the form of Blackness commodified, synthesis. It also defines the double com…
Political Imaginaries
This chapter investigates the Sorbonne, a predominantly male, nationalist, and pro-Gbagbo speakers' corner in Plateau, and the organization of orators who made it their place of work. Predominantly underemployed spectators and orators filled their otherwise idle time with Sorbonne activity. It was a protected space for Gbagboist autochthons to enact, by embracing the correct rhetoric and appurtenances, a hyperbole of modern manhood. The chapter t…
With Every Grace and Cuff Link
This chapter situates the author's account of Abidjanais men within the narrative arc of Black masculinity in racial capitalism. It considers what is at stake for identities both rooted in and negated by processes of capitalist accumulation and disposability, as well as for the world at large. The chapter then jumps to probe the ways that capitalism becomes embedded within such forms of sociality and meaning-making, just as it becomes the very co…
The Visual Terrain of Blackness
This chapter highlights the visual terrain of Blackness in Abidjan's quartiers populaires. It interrogates sartorial expression, the brand, and the space of the sign as extensions of the media icon. The chapter first studies how marginal men employ their bodies to approximate the icons they so admire. It then highlights one brand, Dolce & Gabbana, that had been appropriated and made ubiquitous in the Abidjanais lexicon. The chapter looks at the a…
Producer, Consumer, Commodity, Surplus
This chapter shows how the location of the Black body as a primary site of struggle, the pervasive value of Blackness-as-commodity despite the exploitation and increasing exclusion of its productive potential, and the dual presence of hegemony and counterhegemony, most visibly expressed in the Black American celebrity, create the conditions for the media trope. It emphasizes the signification of Blackness and Black masculinity in racial capitalis…
Citoyens and Citadins
This chapter examines how the évolué and media trope contributed to the construction of masculinities in Abidjan amid civil war and sustained economic decline. It uses ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with political propagandists, or orators (orateurs), for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors (vendeurs ambulants) in Abidjan from 2008 to 2009, supplemented by visual analysis, to demonstrate how underemployed Abidjanais m…
Epigraph
Extract On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come li…
Politics, Crisis, and the Canon: A Commentary on Michael Burawoy’s ‘Decolonizing Sociology: The Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois’
A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism
This book examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, the book shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chr…
Black Masculinity
Gender and racial identity are central to establishing hierarchies of value in the modern world. These stratifications originate in the economic structure and social relations of capitalism, a system in which masculinity assumed a dominant, and blackness a subordinate, position. Situated in a contradictory social location, black masculinity is typically problematized, construed as deviant or deficient to normative masculinity. Understanding this …
Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France
Racial Capitalism and the Crisis of Black Masculinity
In this article, I theorize "complicit masculinity" to examine how access to capital, in other words, making or spending money, mediates masculine identity for un- and underemployed black men. Arguing that hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity and through tropes of blackness within a system of racial capitalism, I show how complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models in the context of severe un-…
Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France
A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism
This book examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, the book shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chr…
Il est garçon: Marginal Abidjanais masculinity and the politics of representation
Narratives of Modernity, Masculinity, and Citizenship Amid Crisis in Abidjan's Sorbonne
In this article I relate prominent depictions of the African urban crisis, particularly informality, and its implications for masculine subjectivity in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2008 and 2009, I consider the Sorbonne , a nationalist space in Abidjan, where partisans of former President Laurent Gbagbo contested the crisis narrative and their place in it. Literally and ideologically, Sor…
Ten Theses of Racial Capitalism
Politics, Crisis, and the Canon: A Commentary on Michael Burawoy’s ‘Decolonizing Sociology: The Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois’
Elsewhere: An essay on borderland ethnography in the informal African city
In this article I reflect upon my experience as an ethnographer within the informal African city, which I describe as a borderland. In the contemporary African city informality prohibits peripheral men from achieving manhood, predicated on marriage, which requires steady work. As perpetual social juniors they fantasize about an elsewhere to which an ever-porous world exposes them but which stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences. Blac…
Creating Public Fictions: The Black Man as Producer and Consumer
(2010). Creating Public Fictions: The Black Man as Producer and Consumer. The Black Scholar: Vol. 40, Black Issues: 2010, pp. 36-42
Creating Public Fictions: The Black Man as Producer and Consumer
(2010). Creating Public Fictions: The Black Man as Producer and Consumer. The Black Scholar: Vol. 40, Black Issues: 2010, pp. 36-42
Il est garçon: Marginal Abidjanais masculinity and the politics of representation
Narratives of Modernity, Masculinity, and Citizenship Amid Crisis in Abidjan's Sorbonne
In this article I relate prominent depictions of the African urban crisis, particularly informality, and its implications for masculine subjectivity in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2008 and 2009, I consider the Sorbonne , a nationalist space in Abidjan, where partisans of former President Laurent Gbagbo contested the crisis narrative and their place in it. Literally and ideologically, Sor…
Elsewhere: An essay on borderland ethnography in the informal African city
In this article I reflect upon my experience as an ethnographer within the informal African city, which I describe as a borderland. In the contemporary African city informality prohibits peripheral men from achieving manhood, predicated on marriage, which requires steady work. As perpetual social juniors they fantasize about an elsewhere to which an ever-porous world exposes them but which stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences. Blac…
Racial Capitalism and the Crisis of Black Masculinity
In this article, I theorize "complicit masculinity" to examine how access to capital, in other words, making or spending money, mediates masculine identity for un- and underemployed black men. Arguing that hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity and through tropes of blackness within a system of racial capitalism, I show how complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models in the context of severe un-…
Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France
Black Masculinity
Gender and racial identity are central to establishing hierarchies of value in the modern world. These stratifications originate in the economic structure and social relations of capitalism, a system in which masculinity assumed a dominant, and blackness a subordinate, position. Situated in a contradictory social location, black masculinity is typically problematized, construed as deviant or deficient to normative masculinity. Understanding this …
Acculturation as Evolution
This chapter discusses the consequences after the colonial economy of civilized wage labor became the “formal” economy upon independence. Despite always constituting the bulk of the urban labor market, informal activities were feminized and made incongruous for masculine identity. The chapter draws on this framework to establish how the évolué shaped modern Abidjanais masculinity. It then explores how the French civilizing mission, or mission civ…
VIP Imaginaries
This chapter explores peripheral Abidjan—the streets and intersections where vendors peddled their goods and the leisure spaces and social worlds where they escaped the stigma of their trade. Vending was a marginalizing activity designated outside the realm of work and deemed inappropriate for men and citizens. To contend with this stigma, the chapter looks at how vendors employed coping strategies from denial to resignification. It emphasizes ho…
Reflections on Intersections/Infrastructure
This chapter explores the politics of the author's positionality in the field. It reflects on the author's fieldwork experiences with Abidjanais men. It also considers how the author's identity as an African American woman entailed for them a direct encounter with elsewhere: an imagined global conceived simultaneously as a space of creativity, possibility, and disillusionment. The chapter highlights how the friction of the ethnographic encounter …
Tropes of Black Masculinity
This chapter shows the French West African évolué and the Black Atlantic media icon as the two tropes that constitute idealized masculinities for Abidjanais men. It documents the hegemonic order of racial capitalism to trace the means by which capitalism situates Black labor, and how accordant imaginaries of Blackness structure the social order and legitimize domination. The chapter also interrogates value creation in racial capitalism, attentive…
The Evolution of the Wage Labor Ideal
This chapter tracks the evolution of the wage labor ideal in French West Africa from the slave economy to the breadwinning family wage at the moment of independence. It reveals how colonization offered the privileges of whiteness to a stratum of African évolué men. The chapter also traces the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism from slavery and colonial subjugation to the postwork economy. It argues that Blackness has been symbo…
La Crise
This chapter starts with a discussion on how ideological moments of Blackness are refracted through the Black male body—laboring or not—in the city, the locus of capitalist modernity in Africa. The chapter recounts a period of economic stasis, protracted civil war, and political interregnum, precipitated by the debt crisis and the fall of commodity prices. Abidjan entered the twenty-first century with nearly 75 percent of its working-age populati…
Imaginaries of Affirmation
This chapter looks at the emergence of the Black Atlantic as a self-referential category, and examines how it has played an important role in vindicating difference outside the register of whiteness. Tasked with subverting the most visible tools of negation, the chapter explores how the imaginaries of affirmation forged connections and borrowed across oceans to reinvent the meaning of Africanity and to transform the reified Black body into an ess…
Imaginaries of Negation
This chapter provides a historical account of labor from colonialism to la crise in the African city with an emphasis on Abidjan. It complements the colonial past and present by tracing lineages of Black Atlantic imaginaries. The chapter sketches the incorporation of Blackness in racial capitalism to analyze its multiple and dialectical potentialities: as negation and in the form of Blackness commodified, synthesis. It also defines the double com…
Political Imaginaries
This chapter investigates the Sorbonne, a predominantly male, nationalist, and pro-Gbagbo speakers' corner in Plateau, and the organization of orators who made it their place of work. Predominantly underemployed spectators and orators filled their otherwise idle time with Sorbonne activity. It was a protected space for Gbagboist autochthons to enact, by embracing the correct rhetoric and appurtenances, a hyperbole of modern manhood. The chapter t…
With Every Grace and Cuff Link
This chapter situates the author's account of Abidjanais men within the narrative arc of Black masculinity in racial capitalism. It considers what is at stake for identities both rooted in and negated by processes of capitalist accumulation and disposability, as well as for the world at large. The chapter then jumps to probe the ways that capitalism becomes embedded within such forms of sociality and meaning-making, just as it becomes the very co…
The Visual Terrain of Blackness
This chapter highlights the visual terrain of Blackness in Abidjan's quartiers populaires. It interrogates sartorial expression, the brand, and the space of the sign as extensions of the media icon. The chapter first studies how marginal men employ their bodies to approximate the icons they so admire. It then highlights one brand, Dolce & Gabbana, that had been appropriated and made ubiquitous in the Abidjanais lexicon. The chapter looks at the a…
Producer, Consumer, Commodity, Surplus
This chapter shows how the location of the Black body as a primary site of struggle, the pervasive value of Blackness-as-commodity despite the exploitation and increasing exclusion of its productive potential, and the dual presence of hegemony and counterhegemony, most visibly expressed in the Black American celebrity, create the conditions for the media trope. It emphasizes the signification of Blackness and Black masculinity in racial capitalis…
Citoyens and Citadins
This chapter examines how the évolué and media trope contributed to the construction of masculinities in Abidjan amid civil war and sustained economic decline. It uses ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with political propagandists, or orators (orateurs), for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors (vendeurs ambulants) in Abidjan from 2008 to 2009, supplemented by visual analysis, to demonstrate how underemployed Abidjanais m…
Epigraph
Extract On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come li…
Politics, Crisis, and the Canon: A Commentary on Michael Burawoy’s ‘Decolonizing Sociology: The Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois’
A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism
This book examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, the book shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chr…
An Ethnography of Racial Capitalism’s Long Crisis: A Reply
Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man
Sociology (26 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · African history and culture studies (18 works) · Masculinity (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Capitalism (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works)