A portrait of Dr Jordanna Matlon smiling and wearing a black shirt

I am an Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University. I received my PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley. Download my CV.


✉ jcmatlon [at] american.edu

✉ jcmatlon [at] gmail.com 

I have a new book under contract with Polity Press! Blackness as being: Black survival in the age of climate catastrophe bridges literatures on surplus populations, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene. It offers Blackness as an analytic to think with the paradox of precarious possibility – of past and present modalities of survival and of futures alternatively devastating or liberatory.

My prior research examined questions of race and colonial legacies in urban Africa and the African diaspora. I probed how “Blackness” operates as a signifier, intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates our understanding of political economy. I employed qualitative methods in fieldwork in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: ethnography, interviews, and visual analysis, to theorize Black masculinity in racial capitalism from Africa and the diaspora broadly. This research culminated in my book, A man among other men: The crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2022).

A man among other men has received twelve awards from five associations across four disciplines. Here they are:

Association-wide awards


Section and division awards


Reviews for my book are available with Africa, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Gender & Society, Journal of Anthropological Research, Men and Masculinities, and Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology. You can also read these fantastic book forums with Jason Jackson, Isabel Pike, Alexandre White, and my response in Socio-Economic Review and with Jean Beaman, Zophia Edwards, Ricarda Hammer, Robert Wyrod, and my response in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and this brilliant symposium with Erin Collins, Carrie Freshour, Malini Ranganathan, and Jonathan Silver in Antipode! Stay tuned for a link to a 2022 interview and book symposium with Jessie Luna, Annie Hikido, A.K.M. Skarpelis, and Yannick Coenders published in the American Sociological Association’s Theory section newsletter, Perspectives. 

Listen to my conversation about the book with Mark Anthony Neal on his Left of Black podcast hosted by Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, as well as my Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics author-meets-critic session. Here is a blog post I wrote for Developing Economics thinking about the stresses of an aspirational yet unachieved breadwinner masculine ideal in the African city. You can read an interview I gave with the Economic Sociology section newsletter, Accounts. And I enjoyed speaking to Annie Hikido in a conversation hosted by the Ethnographic Café (passcode =iv6J+zu). You can also check out my discussion of Black masculinity and the wage earner ideal on the Big World Podcast at AU’s School of International Service, and a panel on the culture of poverty myth and anti-Blackness that I moderated for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Culture.

For a take on some of my book’s theoretical ideas in earlier form, you can read my Boston Review  article, “Black masculinity under racial capitalism,” and my American Sociological Review (ASR) article, “Racial capitalism and the crisis of black masculinity.”  My ASR article received the 2018 best article award from two American Sociological Association’s Sections: Race, Gender, and Class, and Global and Transnational Sociology. It received an honorable mention from the 2017 American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.


Listen to my thoughts on decolonizing the sociological canon (beginning 37:20) hosted by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and in conversation with Michael Burawoy and Freeden Blume Oeur. And here is a piece I wrote about decolonizing the curriculum for Black Perspectives, published by the African American Intellectual Historical Society (AAIHS).