Antipode video abstract (Jordanna Matlon)
Channel: Jordanna Matlon
Date: 2014-01-23

Link to article: http://goo.gl/QenqzS
 
In this video Jordanna discusses her forthcoming article in Antipode 46:3, "Narratives of Modernity, Masculinity and Citizenship amid Crisis in Abidjan's Sorbonne." She situates the Sorbonne, a public speaking area in the center of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, within the context of the political and military conflict that led to its rise and ultimate demise. Next, she positions the Sorbonne as a social space where men reframed the crisis narrative and their place in it, drawing on a legacy of Abidjan as the "Paris of West Africa" to articulate themes of modernity, masculinity and citizenship. Literally and ideologically, predominantly un- and underemployed men centered themselves from the global and urban periphery. They enacted hyperbolized modern masculinities in opposition to their former French colonizers and migrants from regional countries. Jordanna divides her article in two parts. In the first, she reviews the crisis literature in the African city with a focus on informality and gendered conceptions of work. In the second, she analyzes Sorbonne sociality under the rubric of politics, a space where men placed themselves and the city at the center of global affairs; poverty, a place where men shared in their experience of poverty while simultaneously generating fantasized identities within a community of insiders; and penises, a masculinist and misogynist space where men asserted their rightful place in the city as men and citizens.

Jordanna is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. She studies the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy. In addition to Antipode she has published in, among other places, Poetics, Contexts, Ethnography, The Black Scholar, Global Dialogue and The Africa Report. She is currently preparing her book manuscript, tentatively titled, "'I will be VIP!': Culture, politics and masculinity on neoliberalism's periphery."

Links to videos about the Sorbonne:
Afrique Arte, "À la Sorbonne." 
http://afrique.arte.tv/blog/?o=3540&oimage=&otitle=Qui%20est%20CAN%20?&p=3494
La Dépêche d'Abidjan, "Il était une fois 'La Sorbonne.'" 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsTdgCG8emA
abidjannetTV, "La Sorbonne, (forum Pro Gbagbo) completement détruite par les agents de la Marie du Plateau." 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ5xFtIPhU4

Special thanks to Carlos Carmonamedina for producing this video.