A Man Among Other Men : The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism

Award winner book of the ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, the Lee Ann Fujii Book Award, Paul Sweezy Outstanding Book Award, ISA Global Development Studies Best Book, ASA Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award, co-winner of the ISA John Ruggie Annual Best Book Award, and co-winner of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Global Division Book Award. A Man among Other Men 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 act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chronological and transatlantic scope that culminates in a deep ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy. A Man among Other Men provides a theoretically innovative, historically grounded, and empirically rich account of Black masculinity that illuminates the sustained power of imaginaries even as capitalism affords a deficit of material opportunities. Revealed is a story of Black abjection set against the anticipation of male privilege, a story of the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism. This book has received honorable mentions by the African Studies Association Best Book Prize, by the American Anthropological Association Society for the Anthropology of Work Best Book, and multiple honorable mentions by the American Sociological Association (Sociology of Development Section; Race, Gender, and Class Section; and Sociology of Sex and Gender Section).