"A Man without a Country": The Boundaries of Legibility, Social Capital, and Cosmopolitan Masculinity

Abstract

In Ebb Tide, the first episode from the second season of The Wire, Bodie Broadus, a rising lieutenant in the Barksdale crew, travels to Philadelphia on behalf of Russell Stringer Bell, who in the aftermath of the first season arrest of Avon Barksdale, is running the day-to-day operations of the crew. The trip is Bodie's first outside of the city of Baltimore, a fact that is comically presented when he is confused when his car radio begins to lose the signal to the radio station he had been listening to. Bodie's confu sion speaks to the larger issue of worldview and how the boundaries of the block often limit the worldviews of The Wire's many characters. Indeed, part of the appeal of The Wire is that it privileges the worldview of the block, though, in the absence of experiences beyond the confines of Balti more's so-called inner city, the block literally becomes a nation—some thing that must be policed and defended at all cost for far too many of its characters. To speak of concerns beyond the block—something perhaps akin to a cosmopolitan worldview in which one is seen as a citizen of the world—is to risk censure from tightly knit hood (i.e., neighborhood) rela tions and to raise suspicions about even more tightly held convictions of what constitutes legitimate hood masculinities. In his book The Minds of Marginalized Blac Men, sociologist Alford A. Young Jr. argues that such a limited view—a social isolation—has adverse effects on the ambitions and life chances of black men relegated to segregated, nonwhite, urban enclaves. Rather than frame his study solely from the standpoint of that isolation, Young observed men whose worldviews and ability to respond creatively to their conditions were enhanced by their mobility beyond the confines of their insular communities. As Young writes of his informants, [T]he group of men with the greatest awareness of the complexity of the