Complicit Masculinity and the Black Urban Imaginary: Locating Belonging in the Mediascape

• In Event: 505 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Race, Class, and Gender in Global Crossroads

Abstract

For urban populations in Africa and across the African diaspora, the absence of formal work threatens masculine identity. Many men respond by embracing neoliberal tropes of blackness located in media narratives across urban peripheries. Drawing on participant observation fieldwork and interviews with mobile street vendors from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire from 2008 to 2009, and supplemented by multimedia content, I explore the relationship between black masculinity and work in the double context of protracted economic and political crisis. Positioned as illegitimate workers and non-citizens, vendors asserted models of masculinity from global black popular culture, articulating performative identities as entrepreneurial and consumerist men. I employ “complicit masculinity” to examine how a relationship to capital mediates masculine identity for black men on Africa’s urban periphery. In so doing I explore the concept of mediascapes, or media narratives that embrace a black way of being a neoliberal man that is doubly hegemonic and counterhegemonic. I argue that complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models for blacks in the neoliberal context of severe un- and underemployment and the failure of the classic breadwinner model for black men globally.

Author

• Jordanna Chris Matlon, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse