Class Performances: Children’s Parties and the Reproduction of Social Class among Diasporic Cameroonians

Cameroonian parents in European and urban returnee diasporas perform social class by staging parties for their schoolaged children. They intuitively conceive of social class in terms of the acquisition of cultural and economic capital and a system of prestige. They migrate to maintain, or achieve, the dignity of being middle class in situations of precarity. Fieldwork in Yaoundé, Berlin, and Paris reveals performances of cosmopolitan class identity centered on children's educational and cultural achievements. On the edges of their children's school-starting and birthday parties, parents painfully discuss the risks their children face and how easily social class status can be undone in this transnational social field.