La Crise

Abstract

This chapter starts with a discussion on how ideological moments of Blackness are refracted through the Black male body—laboring or not—in the city, the locus of capitalist modernity in Africa. The chapter recounts a period of economic stasis, protracted civil war, and political interregnum, precipitated by the debt crisis and the fall of commodity prices. Abidjan entered the twenty-first century with nearly 75 percent of its working-age population involved in the informal economy. The chapter unfolds the similar patterns of un- and underemployment that have occurred for Black men in postindustrial cities in the global North and together reflect the “disposability” of Black men in late capitalism. It theorizes that men on both sides of the Black Atlantic, formerly positioned as exploited and undervalued labor, have now entered an economic regime of overwhelming exclusion. The chapter argues that imaginaries that circulate throughout the Black Atlantic structure how men express their lived experiences, narrating their livelihood strategies and shaping their lifestyles.