book review by A.K.M. Skarpelis
(Berlin Social Science Center)
Matlon’s first book is a historically grounded political ethnography of Black masculinity in Abidjan, a city on the Southern Atlantic coast of Côte d’Ivoire. The volume asks “how racialized imaginaries of the ideal man shifted in response to changing capitalist regimes” (Matlon 2022: 15). Thanks to multi-sited fieldwork – including historical research, participant observation fieldwork and interviews – Matlon succeeds at articulating an argument that goes above and beyond her 2016 American Sociological Review article. Where the article showed how “hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity” (Matlon 2016: 1014), the book impressively embeds these present-day actions in colonial and postcolonial Ivoirian histories. This review focuses on three themes that run through the book: How to think through the legacies of slavery and colonialism; how the exclusion of Black men is instantiated under racial capitalism; and how her interlocutors’ attempts at reclaiming masculinity and self-worth reproduce gendered inequalities and introduce new ethnic and regional ones.
Making a sound argument about historical legacies is tricky. It would have been easy to opt for a coarse-grained analysis of Ivoirian political economy that advances a straightforward history of path dependence and cumulative disadvantage. However, Matlon chooses a more difficult path: By taking us through centuries of racial capitalism – beginning with slavery, through colonialism, decolonization and into the present – she puts forward an argument about how institutional infrastructures and imagined futures guide the present-day action of her interlocutors.
Making a sound argument about historical legacies is tricky. It would have been easy to opt for a coarse-grained analysis of Ivoirian political economy that advances a straightforward history of path dependence and cumulative disadvantage. However, Matlon chooses a more difficult path: By taking us through centuries of racial capitalism – beginning with slavery, through colonialism, decolonization and into the present – she puts forward an argument about how institutional infrastructures and imagined futures guide the present-day action of her interlocutors.
Take the évolués – literally, “the evolved” – a group of élite Black men who under French colonial rule straddled the world of colonists and that of African chiefs. No longer a mere subject but also not a full rights-bearing citizen like the French colonizers, the évolués were considered living proof of the success of the French “civilizational mission” (sic). For this, they were rewarded with well-paying public sector employment, a literal “mise-en-valeur.” The little that colonial systems provided came crashing down as France withdrew from Côte d’Ivoire, and the previously available status of the évolué was no longer available as public sector employment crumbled. After decolonization, the assimilationist “privileges” (sic) that had shaped a local urban bourgeoisie were replaced by an increasing share of informal labor. No longer able to access the security and social status of formal labor, Matlon argues, shifts both masculinist imaginaries and men’s intimate and political behaviors, especially from the 1980s onwards. Many men turn to ritualized misogyny and entitled masculinity: In short, évolué exceptionalism out of reach, they attempt to thrive in systems of domination, rather than rebel against them. Concretely, this means the men flock to informal labor markets, even when these do not provide sufficient salaries to support them, much less sustain a breadwinner role in families. This has the consequence that many of the men refuse formal fatherhood altogether, because they do not have the means, “les moyens.” It also leads to an idolization of the Anglophone world, especially that of African Americans in the entertainment sector. Moving on from French colonial legacies thus takes the form adopting neoliberal US forms of commodification of the self, even where this does not end up living up to prior potentials for social and economic status. Matlon describes this beautifully in chapter 10, “VIP imaginaries.” Here she offers among others the examples of a footballer called Patrick; Tino and MC Black, the musicians who also double as her research assistants and local informants; as well as street vendors. Patrick, an Abidjanais man who once played for a club in Togo, has relied on his kin and neighborhood to provide for him since returning to take care of his ailing father. In spite of getting on in age, both Patrick and his community continue investing in him because they believe that he stands a chance at eventually being signed as a professional. Avenues of French-style public sector employment increasingly closed off, the only opportunity for the men is now to aim for media stardom, as unlikely as this is.
Two exciting dissertations-in-progress are dealing with similar questions of how imaginaries and historical legacies shape personal agency. Julia Stier’s (2021) work on young Senegalese’s migration decision finds that migrants present their lives on social media in distorted and only positive ways. This has two consequences: Local Senegalese exhibit higher intentions to migrate; and conversely, kin who stay behind have come to expect regular remittances, even as the migrants cannot really afford them because they are stuck in bad jobs. Elena Ayala- Hurtado’s (2021) work on Spanish youth in turn finds that although young graduates denounce the “achievement narrative” of future stable employment as fraudulent, they still attach to it in spite of their lived experience to the contrary. I mention these in-progress works because they show how productive it is to conduct ethnographic work that combines the literatures on temporalities and imagined futures with those on migration and (racial) capitalism.
Across different cases, the scholarship reveals how dashed hopes and expectations do not necessarily result in despondency, but that discordant experiences may be resolved by privileging past conditions and hopes rather than acting based on one’s own lived experience. Put differently: Hope dies last. And this is something Matlon shows with sincerity across the life histories of different men. Matlon’s prose remains sincere and professional even as she describes how an orator at the Sorbonne – a postcolonial urban speaker’s corner dominated by male nationalists – waves a black dildo in the air while making jokes at her expense. While one might miss a more in-depth engagement with theory and substance of racial capitalism in the overall book. Matlon’s argument is complex and nuanced even when political implications are thorny:
For example when she shows how Abidjanais men engage in ritualized misogyny and entitled masculinity; or when it turns out that French withdrawal from Côte d’Ivoire is accompanied by the collapse of lucrative public sector employment. In less capable hands, such complexities may have been described in ways that could have exceptionalized the men’s sexuality, or partially redeemed colonial-period institutions. In Matlon’s oeuvre on the other hand, we are taken into the intimate worlds of “surplus” men’s arrested masculinities, and understand how the Black Atlantic enmeshes with historical imaginaries of colonial-period évolués to reproduce existing social cleavages.
References
Ayala-Hurtado, Elena. 2021. “Narrative Continuity/Rupture: Projected Professional Futures amid Pervasive Employment Precarity,” Work and Occupations 49(1):45-78.
Matlon, Jordanna. 2016. "Racial Capitalism and the Crisis of Black Masculinity," American Sociological Review 81(5):1014-38.
Matlon, Jordanna. 2022. A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stier, Julia. 2021. "Die Macht der Bilder: Der Einfluss gesellschaftlicher Vorstellungen auf Migrationsentscheidungen im Senegal." WZB-Mitteilungen 173.
Two exciting dissertations-in-progress are dealing with similar questions of how imaginaries and historical legacies shape personal agency. Julia Stier’s (2021) work on young Senegalese’s migration decision finds that migrants present their lives on social media in distorted and only positive ways. This has two consequences: Local Senegalese exhibit higher intentions to migrate; and conversely, kin who stay behind have come to expect regular remittances, even as the migrants cannot really afford them because they are stuck in bad jobs. Elena Ayala- Hurtado’s (2021) work on Spanish youth in turn finds that although young graduates denounce the “achievement narrative” of future stable employment as fraudulent, they still attach to it in spite of their lived experience to the contrary. I mention these in-progress works because they show how productive it is to conduct ethnographic work that combines the literatures on temporalities and imagined futures with those on migration and (racial) capitalism.
Across different cases, the scholarship reveals how dashed hopes and expectations do not necessarily result in despondency, but that discordant experiences may be resolved by privileging past conditions and hopes rather than acting based on one’s own lived experience. Put differently: Hope dies last. And this is something Matlon shows with sincerity across the life histories of different men. Matlon’s prose remains sincere and professional even as she describes how an orator at the Sorbonne – a postcolonial urban speaker’s corner dominated by male nationalists – waves a black dildo in the air while making jokes at her expense. While one might miss a more in-depth engagement with theory and substance of racial capitalism in the overall book. Matlon’s argument is complex and nuanced even when political implications are thorny:
For example when she shows how Abidjanais men engage in ritualized misogyny and entitled masculinity; or when it turns out that French withdrawal from Côte d’Ivoire is accompanied by the collapse of lucrative public sector employment. In less capable hands, such complexities may have been described in ways that could have exceptionalized the men’s sexuality, or partially redeemed colonial-period institutions. In Matlon’s oeuvre on the other hand, we are taken into the intimate worlds of “surplus” men’s arrested masculinities, and understand how the Black Atlantic enmeshes with historical imaginaries of colonial-period évolués to reproduce existing social cleavages.
References
Ayala-Hurtado, Elena. 2021. “Narrative Continuity/Rupture: Projected Professional Futures amid Pervasive Employment Precarity,” Work and Occupations 49(1):45-78.
Matlon, Jordanna. 2016. "Racial Capitalism and the Crisis of Black Masculinity," American Sociological Review 81(5):1014-38.
Matlon, Jordanna. 2022. A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stier, Julia. 2021. "Die Macht der Bilder: Der Einfluss gesellschaftlicher Vorstellungen auf Migrationsentscheidungen im Senegal." WZB-Mitteilungen 173.
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