Speaker
Description
Abstract:
In this talk, I explore labor narratives and imaginaries of Black masculinity to explore how racialized ideals of manhood shifted in response to changing capitalist regimes. Complemented by an analysis of Black masculinity vis-à-vis capitalist processes of production, consumption, and commodification, I examine colonialism to the period known as la crise (the crisis) as a narrative arc in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. I draw on my fieldwork examining the livelihoods and lifestyles of underemployed Abidjanais men to illuminate the sustained power of imaginaries even while capitalism affords a deficit of real opportunities.
Bio: Dr. Matlon is an urban sociologist and scholar of race and colonial legacies in Africa and the African diaspora. Her scholarship interrogates the ways “Blackness” operates as a signifier, intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates our understanding of political economy. Her multiple award-winning book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Cornell University Press) investigates the relationship between masculinity, work, and globalization in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Her new book, Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe (under contract, Polity Press), bridges literatures on surplus populations, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene. It offers Blackness as an analytic to think with the paradox of precarious possibility – of past and present modalities of survival and of futures alternatively devastating or liberatory.
