The Long Crisis of Racial Capitalism - Jordanna Matlon

Jordanna Matlon (American University, Washington DC,Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse) présente (en anglais) son travail et son ouvrage autour du lien entre masculinité noire et capitalisme racial. 

Résumé: In this talk, Matlon first 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 root masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Matlon provides a broad chronological and transatlantic account of Black masculinity that culminates in an ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of vendeurs ambulants, underemployed men in Abidjan's informal economy. In doing so, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of racial identity and patriarchy. Matlon closes this talk with an exploratory discussion of her next book project, Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe, in which she bridges literatures on surplus labor, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene.