Integrating into a Disintegrating French Middle Class: Reproducing Affective Circuits and Economic Morality in Senegalese Households in Paris

Faced with economic decline and heightened xenophobia, university-educated Senegalese in Paris provide a striking example of the ways transnational migrants reinforce class and education-based hierarchies as they struggle to transmit a place in France’s shrinking middle class to their children. This paper examines ways that “economic moralities,” ideologies that endow acts of material exchange with social meaning and moral valence, structure affective circuits. Transcription analysis of talk recorded in transnational Senegalese households reveals how the dialectic relationship between affective circuits and economic moralities is shaped by French official policy of immigrant “integration.” I examine how France’s political ideology of republicanism stratifies transnational populations through examination of the ways that educated migrants from Dakar adopt the language of the French state to question the legal status of other transnational (Senegalese) migrants. I then demonstrate how economic moralities shift with context and participant framework, analyzing how affective circuits between Senegalese kin alter normative ideologies as speakers adapt their moral stance to accommodate family members, while simultaneously indexing the boundaries and conditions of moral and material support. Through examination of discussions in which transnational families interpret and evaluate class-divided economic practices, I trace the circulation of normative ideologies across contexts, examining how the moral valence Senegalese attribute to economic practices shifts as participants make allowances for kin, while tacitly communicating the boundaries of affective circuits.