Strategic Investments in Multiple Middle Classes: Morals and Mobility between Paris and Dakar

This article examines the social work of maintaining middle-class status in multiple national contexts, focusing on university-educated Senegalese in Paris. Once considered elite African intellectuals, these Senegalese find that diplomas no longer protect them from stigmatization in France. While Senegalese increasingly associate Islam with lucrative paths to mobility, in France, religion is treated as a barrier to belonging. French fluency and formal education index status in Senegal and facilitate integration in France, whereas religion is a key point of divergence between French and Senegalese notions of class, complicating efforts to achieve status transnationally. I argue that investments in multiple middle classes are complicated by a growing political and economic distance between Senegal and its former colonizer, showing how the symbols and stakes of middle-classness shift with national context and political–economic transformations.