CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024

Friday, October 20th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Salle du Conseil (13 Rue de l'Université)

The Long Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism

Jordanna Matlon
Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

In this talk, Matlon 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, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness root masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification.

Matlon provides a broad chronological and transatlantic account of Black masculinity that culminates in an ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of vendeurs ambulants, underemployed men in Abidjan's informal economy. In doing so, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy.

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