This is a generous, intersecting study of men seeking survival and status, from colonial times to the present, in the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire. Using a lightly traced Gramscian framework to evince relations of power, compliance, and complicity, Matlon shows that, ‘Hegemony and consent provide a vocabulary to examine Black masculinity subjectively in racial capitalism from colonial conquest to economies of surplus labor’ (p. 14). In Côte d'Ivoire's contemporary society, the colonial mission civilisatrice is hard-baked into everything from advertising to city planning, and embodied by les évolués, those who have ‘evolved’ to become more French-like in manners and aspirations. But what happens to those men who do not make the grade, for whom economic agency is a precondition of masculinity, as the author contends? Matlon argues that the only way to understand the permanent condition of Blackness in racial capitalism is crisis (p. 240). Despite the enduring European (especially French) political and economic influence on life in Côte d'Ivoire, throughout this book we are offered frequent and fruitful comparisons showing the enormous influence of African American political moments (especially the civil rights and Black Power movements) and cultural contributions like music on a range of Black men in Côte d'Ivoire and across the Black Atlantic. From rapper Tupac Shakur to Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, Matlon makes a convincing case for an emblematic global Black male caught in the throes of capitalism, which simultaneously, if inadvertently, buttresses the very framework of capitalist racial structures and imaginaries. One of the two groups of men Matlon looks at most closely are those who gather at the meeting placed dubbed the Sorbonne to listen, learn, and make witness with orators sermonizing on the issues of the day, ‘from penises to politics’, as one speaker terms it (p. 147), decrying the injustices, championing a favoured politician, pontificating with invocations of nationalist pride, misogyny, and protest. Mobile street vendors make up the other group she studied, young men who work the streets not to thrive but to survive, including through ingenious collective savings systems. The first half of A man among other men is mainly historical and provides a conceptual exegesis on literatures relating to masculinity, colonialism, race, and racism. Situating the entire study in a carefully considered account of slavery and colonialism in West Africa, Matlon links the reinforcement of hegemonic norms of breadwinning to complicit masculinity. An astute selection of photographs and advertisements from the colonial era visually highlights her thesis that the transitions from slavery to colonial subject to capitalist consumer, rather than representing one rupture after another, instead are of a piece with racial domination and consent. Putting writings by scholars such as Richard Banégas, Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, and Sasha Newell to good use for the case study at hand of orators and vendors in Côte d'Ivoire, Malton makes her case that the sum and substance of racial and economic inequalities in that region throughout history have served to keep Black men continuously off balance and dependent in the scramble for lives of subsistence. Yet how creative and colourful are those lives. The second half of the book is where Matlon develops most fully her ethnographic material, based on interviews, focus groups, and ‘hanging out’ (p. 138) with orators, vendors, families, and friends, in their homes, on football pitches, clubs, and in the streets of the capital city of Abidjan. Interspersed in these chapters are photographs of contemporary youths, including of those engaged with the author in ‘hip-hop cosmopolitanism’, and, especially compelling, photographs of one or another barbershop, integral to the affirmation that ‘aesthetic achievements doubled as assertions of global belonging’ (p. 231). Jordanna Matlon ends her study on masculinity and racial capitalism in Côte d'Ivoire with a valuable postscript on herself. Or, rather, the relationships she developed in the course of fieldwork, linked closely to the identities she embodied for others in her research site: African American, woman, metropolitan, racially mixed métisse. She shows how these identities provided an alluring potential source of financial resources and social capital, and how she herself became the personification of a kind of ‘infrastructure’ for the men she studied. As ethnographers know well, the point is not to escape who we are or how we may be perceived; rather, we must always strive to understand how these factors may impact and enhance the work we do.
Matthew C. Gutmann (Fri,) studied this question.