Jordanna Matlon, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism. Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press (hb US$125 – 978 1 5017 6286 4; pb US$29.95 – 978 1 5017 6293 2). 2022, 293 pp. Jordanna Matlon’s ethnographic work traces Black men’s strategies and struggles in emulating colonial and postcolonial imaginaries/ideals and their subsequent shift towards emulating Black Atlantic media imaginaries/ideals. This crisis is alluded to against the backdrop of the global capitalist system’s transition predominantly from economies of exploitation to economies of exclusion. In this book, Matlon tries to advance a theory of racial capitalism through a narration of Black men’s strategies in either affirming or negating Blackness in different historical contexts, especially under the banner of varied politics of representation, while remaining complicit with a racial capitalist ethos and logic. The study draws from her ethnographic fieldwork in 2008–09 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire – the model colony for francophone Africa. The book, broadly divided into three parts, reflects the author’s consistent personal and scholarly engagement with the field, coupled with empirical analyses that are presented with a robust theoretical rigour. Jordanna Matlon opens her argument with an analysis of a billboard in Abidjan, the capital and largest city of the West African country Côte d’Ivoire. The bill- board, which portrays men standing together and cheering for a beer company of Irish origin, has an exquisite mixed linguistic expression. The advertisement reads ‘Il y a de la GREATNESS (There is GREATNESS in each man)’ (p. 2). Interestingly, the profession or trade of the man who holds the banner is conspicuously indiscernible. Matlon uses this advert as a prop to show how anglophone imaginaries are manifested in francophone Africa through a valorization of consumption and an elision of work identity, both (post)colonial ideals for Ivorian Black men. She elaborates on the role of France’s civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) in reproducing the colo- nial political economy through the production and classification of wage labour. Matlon presents this as the ‘colon-as-évolué’ (p. 103). Colon refers to a Black man who embodies colonial work and cultural ethics. As a model, the colon is predicated on a work identity and a gendered role in the running of the family – that is, a male breadwinner with a salaried job in the colonial administration or economy. Colonized Black men were expected to emulate this waged labour évolué (‘evolved’ person) and acculture themselves to French social and cultural mores. Matlon calls this strategy, through which Black men try to narrow the racial distance, as negating Blackness. The colon model survived even three decades after Côte d’Ivoire’s independence, as President Félix Houphouët-Boigny never severed economic ties with France. In the chapter titled ‘ La crise’ (The crisis), Matlon describes the political and economic crisis in Côte d’ Ivoire and establishes her theoretical premise before explicating her arguments in the ethnographic chapters in the third part of the book. As Ivorian society witnessed, achieving the French civilizational ideal (i.e. of the colon – the wage labour évolué) was structurally untenable; such goals were either only available to political and cultural elites or economically unviable for the Ivorian economy. The crisis that began in the 1980s, almost two decades after the political decolonization of Côte d’Ivoire, saw the entry of anglophone imaginaries into Ivorian youth culture. During the crisis (which lasted until the Book reviews 453 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000529 Published online by Cambridge University Press