[Linganth] Chelsie Yount discusses her new book on Senegalese migrants

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,

Today on the blog, Chelsie Yount answers Ashley McDermott's question about
her book, *Selective Solidarity: Children and Middle-Class Moralities in
Transnational Senegal.  *

www.campanthropology.org

Best,

Ilana

*Selective Solidarity* examines how global inequalities change the ways
transnational families negotiate “economic moralities,” or expectations
about material obligations. Analyzing everyday exchanges in middle-class
Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar, this book traces links between
the language that mediates acts of food sharing and gift giving, and moral
discourses that shape redistribution beyond the household. Foregrounding
children’s role in transnational relations, anthropologist Chelsie Yount
urges us to rethink questions of agency in economic practice.

How do children grapple with the multiple, and sometimes contradictory,
moral expectations they encounter at home and abroad? What can their
practical struggles tell us about the ways the decline of the middle class
in Europe impacts kinship connections in the African diaspora? The
difficulties migrant parents face in transmitting class status to their
French-born children lays bare the fact that for visible minorities,
“integration” is not a state one can achieve once and for all, but a
process that can potentially be undone. Yount argues that the French-born
children of Senegalese, acutely aware of the discrimination they face in
France, also forge affective and economic connections abroad that are key
to creating and reproducing transnational kinship.

At its heart, *Selective Solidarity* is about children’s experiences
sharing food and giving gifts in Paris and on trips to Dakar. This book
considers experiences of family life in global capitalism, focusing on
middle-class downward mobility to highlight the ways socioeconomic
relations are redefined as resources stretch thin. Highlighting the uneven
terrain of transnational kinship, *Selective Solidarity* offers a new
perspective on theories of value, revealing how moral expectations of
kinship in Africa are bound up with values of immigrant integration in
Europe. Together, these economic moralities shape families’ attempts to
navigate the vicissitudes of tiered migration trajectories as heightened
tensions surrounding migration reconfigure class structures globally.
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