In A Man Among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism, sociologist Jordanna Matlon explores the construction of imaginaries of Blackness and masculinity and how these imaginaries “sustain a global system of racial capitalism” (23). While Matlon’s fieldwork centers on Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, her analysis holds critical insights for the Black Atlantic more broadly, elucidating “the challenges that Black men face as excluded men in a global system of racial capitalism” (19). Incorporating the work of key Africanist scholars, Black Atlantic theorists, and Marxist thinkers, Matlon presents an interdisciplinary and theoretically sophisticated study of masculinity across the Black Atlantic and the pressures of global racial capitalism.

The book is split into three parts with eleven chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and a postscript. The Introduction, “Greatness in Each Man,” presents Matlon’s core argument; namely, that “Blackness has been symbolically positioned against white supremacy as a manifestation of capitalist hegemony, locating the terrain of Black struggle in the arenas of representation and political economy” (15). Part I, “Theorizing Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism,” lays out the theoretical scaffolding for the entire study. Chapter One, “Tropes of Black Masculinity,” tracks the development of the primary tropes tracked throughout the text: the évolué and the media icon. Chapter Two, “The Evolution of the Wage Labor Ideal,” turns to French colonial rule, when administrators decided that “Africa’s new value was to be in the exploitation of labor and the extraction of land and resources in equal measure” (35). Chapter Three, “Producer, Consumer, Commodity, Surplus,” explores the “exploitation of Black bodies” across the Atlantic within a system enmeshing commodification with consumption. Part I demonstrates how, across the long twentieth century, “a hegemonic, diasporic representation repertoire of Black masculinity … contained the history of its struggle and transcribed its material and ideological tensions onto the familiar terrain of unmet aspiration on the continent” (58).

Part II, “Between Place and Imaginaries,” offers a history of Abidjan and Côte d’Ivoire from French colonial rule through la crise, traced through evolving imaginaries of gender and Blackness. Chapter Four, “Imaginaries of Negation,” explores the constructions of Blackness as negation through the “reification of racial difference” in colonial writings, exhibitions, photography, and film (75). Chapter Five, “Acculturation as Evolution,” unravels the construction of Abidjanais identity from the colonial era to la crise through the development of social and racial hierarchies and political figures like Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Chapter Six, “Imaginaries of Affirmation,” tracks the “emergence of the Black Atlantic as a self-referential category … [which] played an important role in vindicating difference outside the register of whiteness,” as movements like Black Power in the United States and Black Consciousness in South Africa “formed connections and borrowed across oceans to reinvent the meaning of Africanity and to transform the reified Black body into an essence of power and beauty—insisting as they did that representation cannot but be a political act” (111). Chapter Seven, “La Crise,” closes Part II with shifts in Ivoirian masculinities following economic collapse.

Part III, “Imaginaries in a Crisis Abidjan,” builds on this theoretical grounding while turning to Matlon’s fieldwork with the university-educated orators of the street Sorbonne and the mobile street vendors of Yopougon and Abobo. Chapter Eight, “Citoyens and Citadins,” presents these overlapping categories of men confronting “failure” in independent Abidjan, captured in the refrain: “Je n’ai pais les moyens (I lack the means)” (138). Chapter Nine, “Political Imaginaries,” explores the Sorbonne as “a forum in the urban core for men to perform dominant masculinities despite the marginal social locations of the actors themselves,” a space sustaining the évolué ideal within a fantasized reality (148). Chapter Ten, “VIP Imaginaries,” turns to mobile street vendors who found legitimacy “in alternative identities had already been well established: media tropes vindicated marginalized Black masculinity across the Atlantic and deep into Abidjan’s periphery” (186). Chapter Eleven, “The Visual Terrain of Blackness,” follows men on the streets of Abidjan who “renegotiate[d] the established meanings that otherwise defined them” through visible consumerism that allowed them to move from “productive identities to consumer acts of possession and transaction” and connecting to “a center of global Black popular culture, through which manhood was expressed as a set of consumer choices” (202, 204, 206).

The Conclusion, “With Every Grace and Cuff Link,” returns to the study’s foundational questions of how Blackness and gender constitute racial capitalism, reaffirming that “crisis is the permanent condition of Blackness in racial capitalism,” with race central to “the formation and operation of the capitalist system” alongside gender as “its core organizing principle” (240). The Postscript, “Reflections on Intersections/Infrastructure,” offers Matlon’s reflection on her positionality as an African American woman conducting fieldwork, becoming both “observer and observed” and forming “an intersection of disparate realities and a shared Black Atlantic imaginary” (243).

Methodologically and theoretically rigorous, A Man Among Other Men holds critical insights for readers interested in masculinity and Blackness across the Black Atlantic, and for scholars across sociology, political economy, and history.