Abstract
I begin this essay with two anecdotes.
In 2007, then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy in a speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, declared, The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history . . . In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress. In this universe where nature commands all, man escapes from the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he rests immobile in the center of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand. This man never launched himself towards the future.
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In my frequent travels to France, I often see Banania products (and ads for them) in supermarkets and other stores. Banania is the brand of a popular instant cocoa drink, dating from 1912, which is often served at French breakfasts. The packaging includes a stark yellow background with a grinning Black man, actually a Senegalese tirailleur, or rifleman (a colonial infantry in the French army in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), with bright red lips with the expression, “Y’a Bon,” a “pidgin” version of “It’s good.” Despite its prevalence, this iconography has also been critiqued as emblematic of French racism and views of Africans more generally. The Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon ([1952] 1967) wrote about Banania in Black Skin, White Masks as an example of objectification of the Senegalese soldiers, and Black men more generally, under French colonial rule.
In both these cases, we see France’s ongoing “mission civilisatrice” or civilizing mission. Despite the official end of French colonial rule in parts of North and West Africa, its logics remain.
I thought about both of these while reading Matlon’s A Man among Other Men, a deeply theoretical analysis of Black masculinity in the vestiges of French colonial rule in the Côte d’Ivoire. Matlon would suggest that the two cases above reflect and represent crises on Black masculinity regarding who the African man is or could ever be, both as subject and object. This is question of how the African man is represented in the French imaginary. And this is a crisis circumscribed by French colonialism.
Relying on scholars as varied as Achille Mbembe, Frederick Cooper, Cheryl Harris, and Cedric Robinson, and based on ethnographic observations and interviews with orators and street venders in Abidjan, the capital city, Matlon provides an analysis of the opportunities, or lack thereof, racial capitalism allows for Black men and how they subvert or contest their subjugation. She argues that racial capitalism involves double commodification of Blackness, as both productive “im/potential” and cultural artifact, and these Black men cope with exclusion from wage economy, through either consumer citizenship and commodity subjectivities. Matlon traces this arc from the origins of French colonial rule of the Côte d’Ivoire to its official end, through la crise in the 1980s, and the civil war from 2002 to 2011. Orators reflected their “évolué,” or evolved, status as closer to French “civilization”—and distant from “Africanness”—by speaking at the Sorbonne, thereby also asserting their own dignity and value relative to their compatriots. Meanwhile, street vendors—or garçons—kept out of the regular wage economy, “s’occuper” or “se débrouiller” by earning “weekend money” and counter the negativity of street vending through other pursuits, including fashion, football, and hip-hop. In short, both the orators and street vendors assert their dignity albeit in different ways. These performances of masculinity are circumscribed by racial capitalism and the commodification of Blackness, which then has implications for their romantic and familial relationships. Even though they have no “real” power—due to not having “real” jobs—they produce and enact it in these relationships.
There is much to mine in this work and at times this book read as two—or perhaps even more—books in one, and its structure (many, shorter chapters) reflects this. First is the critical analysis of how racial capitalism has historically functioned, and continues to function, in Côte d’Ivoire, including how it is interwoven with colonialism and its legacies and functions outside of the United States. The second is an ethnography of how racial capitalism constrains choices and opportunities for (two groups of) Black men, and what racial capitalism actually looks like in practice and how it is actually mapped onto the (Black) body. Given the insights of this second part, I personally would have wanted to read more of the rich ethnographic details and meet more of the men; the ethnography does not really begin until about 100 pages into the text. In structuring the text this way, I feel Matlon missed an opportunity to more richly integrate her theoretical framework with her empirical examples. Similarly, I wish the writing had been less jargony.
Matlon borrows the title of this book from a quote from Frantz Fanon’s ([1952] 1967) Black Skin, White Masks, in which he states, “All I wanted was to be a man among other men” (p. 112). This point about recognition gets to the heart of Matlon’s analysis: what Black men are recognized as, versus how they want to be recognized. In an oft-quoted excerpt from the same text, Fanon writes of walking the streets of Paris and a young White boy seeing him, and saying to his mother, “Look Mama, a Negro!” In that instance, Fanon recognized how he was recognized by others, as subordinate. This denial of recognition as one wants to be seen—as a man—reflects what it means to be a Black man in this moment of postcolonial, late-stage capitalism. And the two cases with which I introduced this essay reflect this as well—how Black, or African, men are recognized by their former colonial power, both historically and presently. Outside of its obvious offensiveness and inaccuracy, such a rendering reflects how European civilization represents the future and therefore Africa is and must remain in the past. This also explains how and why Banania iconography still circulates so freely in present-day France. And they also reflect questions of temporality and its relation to colonialism, which I would like to hear more from Matlon about. One question that then arises is whether or not colonialism has ever really ended.
Of the many interventions and theoretical insights in this book, I am going to focus in the rest of this essay on what this book suggests regarding global Blackness and Black solidarities. I wondered how much the analysis is an analysis of definitions of Blackness and masculinity vis-à-vis colonialism, versus racial capitalism per se—not that these are unrelated but I would have liked to hear more about the former. In this vein, I was fascinated reading about the street vendors and how they contested the negative connotations associated with their work. One of the strategies for doing so is referencing a global Black imaginary, and in particular, African American popular culture. For example, Matlon writes of how figures such as Tupac Shakur resonate as an example of a Black man whose life was cut too short, and images of Usher or Michael Jordan adorn vendors’ clothing and placards of barber shops. This reflects the “purchase” of African American popular culture, as it intersects with racial and colonial logics. As Matlon writes, “Blackness identifies both within and across situated communities. Men of the African diaspora have looked to Africa, and Africans to the diaspora, to vindicate themselves such that Blackness offers alliances, sensibilities, and shared imaginaries” (pp. 228–229).
I have found this as well in my own ethnographic work with ethnoracial minorities in France, whereby African American culture and history serves as repertoire for situating and subverting the marginalization and racism ethnoracial minorities experience (Beaman 2017). One can similarly see references to African American culture in particular businesses such as hair salons or barber shops, on street mural or protest signs, in communities like Paris’s 19th or 20th arrondissements. This suggests, among other things, a symmetry in French racial thinking in the metropole and the colony. Moreover, in my interviews with adult children of Maghrébin immigrants, they commonly made connections to aspects of African American struggle, such as the Civil Rights Movement or the Autobiography of Malcom X, to explain their own plight. This was not because there are not similar figures within French (colonial) history, but rather because French Republicanism actively suppresses these histories, such that the U.S. Civil Rights Movement or Martin Luther King is invoked more than the 1962 Algerian War of Independence, the Haitian Revolution, or Aimé Césaire. This is another way that African American culture “travels” by being the signification of racialized marginalization and struggles for Black liberation.
In 2012, then-French presidential candidate (and later president) Francois Hollande filmed a campaign video in the last weeks of his campaign of him traveling through different banlieue communities, such as Aulnay-sous-Bois and Clichy-sous-Bois, taking the train, interspersed with Black and Arab individuals displaying their electoral cards. The racial signaling becomes even more evident when considering the soundtrack for the video—Jay Z and Kanye West’s “Niggas in Paris” (Rollefson 2021). 2 That a popular American hip-hop song gets refracted as cultural artifact, versus Hollande using a French hip-hop song, for example, speaks to this resonance of African American popular culture for both White and Black alike.
Blackness, and therefore Black solidarities, or solidarities around shared experiences of being Black, are not bound to any particular nation-state as Hollande’s video or Matlon’s street vendors illustrate. But what does this portend for global Black solidarities in terms of mobilizing against racism or racial capitalism? How can definitions of what it means to be Black—not just a Black man, but Black—be contested beyond the confines of nation-state borders? How can connections among Black populations globally be leveraged in this period of late-stage capitalism to contest France’s civilizing mission, whose logics remain?