Middle-class Subject Research Articles

Embodied Suzhi: Constituting Middle-Class Subjectivity in Post-Socialist China

Suzhi has grown into a key bio-policy that is crucial to governance and individual life in post-socialist China. Drawing upon Bourdieusian habitus, this article examines how millennial middle-class women live the class-based suzhi on a daily basis in the fields of education, marriage and real estate. Class divisions configure women’s habitual pursuit of cultural suzhi, and their embodied capital is reflected in practical situations. Women embody cultural suzhi and specific life experiences as middle-class daughters. They are inclined to have matched marriages to ensure personal happiness. But middle-class women demonstrate high neoliberal reflexivity in performing civil suzhi in the field of real estate. Neoliberal feminism is materialised through suzhi: Women exhibit reflexivity in their embodied experiences of suzhi while also internalising class structures and state power, thus reinforcing the insidious reproduction of social inequality.

Anglo-Indian/Christian Middle-Class and Consumerist Modernity in the 1970s Hindi Cinema

The paper analyses class negotiations in Hindi films of the 1970s, which conflate Anglo-Indian identity, Christianity, and middle-class subjectivity in three distinct social forms, viz., middle-class cinema, mainstream cinema, and art-house cinema. Films of the 1970s employ the Anglo-Indian identity to map the negotiations taking place along the class boundaries of a feudal order and an emergent bourgeois order, rather than limited to being the “other.” The community’s mediations with consumerist modernity, which is a marker of the bourgeois lifestyle, and how it gets articulated in the public narratives about them become crucial as Anglo-Indians are identified with the values of the capitalist West and therefore also for being “icons of commodity culture” in the Hindi filmic world right from the 1920s and 30s. The paper examines how the cultural representation of the Anglo-Indian/Christian community in films of these three categories responded to the consumerist modernity of the times while negotiating class boundaries. The first section on middle-class cinema discusses Basu Chatterjee’s Baton Baton Mein (1979); the second section deals with K. S. Sethumadhavan’s mainstream film Julie (1975); and the third section on art-house cinema analyses Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai (1980).

The Forgotten Icon of ‘68 in Turkey: Hüseyin Cevahir

This essay focuses on Hüseyin Cevahir, a revolutionary with roots in the Alevite-Kurdish formation and one of the forgotten student leaders of ’68 in Turkey. The essay underscores Cevahir’s presence within the Turkish Left as not merely a matter of cultural difference. On the contrary, his silent but transformative effects on the Turkish Left stemmed from his subaltern presence, embodied in a double memory. Cevahir incorporated his knowledge of the racialized community of Dersim, in which he was born, into his intellectual awareness, undermining any sovereign subjectivization under the pretext of the universality of the state. Simultaneously, his subaltern experiences helped him to transfigure the racial structures of domination that shaped the political imaginary of middle-class subjectivity among revolutionary Turkish youth under the pretext of class universality. One can thus infer that the main factor behind Cevahir’s oblivion in the counterpublic in Turkey is this double criticism embodied in his persona.

Eventually detached, eventually belonging. A residential narratives' based institutionalist perspective on urban regeneration and the middle classes in Milan and Marseille

Notwithstanding major evolutions in both class identity and broader structural processes, generically defined “middle classes” are still a target for both investors seeking effective remuneration strategies and urban governments striving to achieve urban competitiveness as well as increased “social cohesion” and “order” in cities. However, despite this enduring centrality, scholars have yet to truly develop a critical discussion around the transformations involving middle classes' subjectivities within urban regeneration discourses and strategies and how they are shaped/adjusted/filtered through the specific forms that their design and implementation assume within particular contexts. We argue that a better grasp of these subjectivities can be critical for a deeper understanding of these strategies, their rationales, tools, outcomes, and shortcomings. The paper intends to fill this gap by investigating such subjectivities through the collection and discussion of “residential narratives”, by which we mean the collection of discourses and representations set forth by households and analyzed about a series of relevant dimensions: expectations, boundaries, and belonging. The narratives were collected in two European urban neighborhoods - one in Milan (Italy) and one in Marseille (France) - involved in variably governed urban regeneration processes centered on shaping and mobilizing middle-class subjectivities. Based on the presented results, the paper argues for a bottom-up institutionalist perspective on how we study urban regeneration discourses and strategies as class-making governing processes. • The mobilization of the middle classes in urban regeneration strategies depends on the cities' broader regulative contexts • Discourses, governance arrangements, and housing provision systems are key factors in the making of urban regeneration strategies • “Residential narratives” is key for understanding the way in which such strategies filter, shape and reshape middle-class identities

‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia

Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their ‘new’ counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects.

Fathers in Early Parenting Programs. Impulses from the European and International Fatherhood Research

Prevention and intervention programs (early parenting programs) which are provided by regional multi-professional networks for families with infants are still addressed to mothers, primarily. The question is whether the European and international fatherhood research can supply valuable suggestions for a better involvement of fathers. We discuss determinants of lived fatherhoods that range from educated fathers of national middle class over fathers with migrant backgrounds up to educationally and economically disadvantaged fathers. We elucidate barriers which stand in the way of father involvement in the current parenting programs, and exemplary describe how the resistance could be successfully overcome.

Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion by Sarah Muir

Reviewed by: Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion by Sarah Muir Yazan Doughan Sarah Muir. Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 200 pp. This is an ethnography of Argentina that weaves together two concerns of contemporary social theory: late- or post- neoliberal temporality and the status of critique in academic and broader intellectual practice. The book's proximal focus is a particular structure of feeling that informs the historical and practical sensibilities of middle-class Argentinians in Buenos Aires in the period immediately succeeding the economic crisis of 2001–2002. Among this milieu, Muir notes, the "dashed promises of twentieth century progress" have given way to a "widespread sense of foreclosed futures," whereby people felt they were now living "an after-ward in which no new beginnings were in sight" (8). This historical sensibility has become "the grounds on which people grappled with all manner of practical issues, both public and intimate" (8). Following the 2001–2002 financial crisis, middle-class Argentinians in Buenos Aires, Muir shows, have come to understand their biographical and national history as a series of repeating crises that continue to unfold in the present. This understanding informed how they lived their everyday life and how they interpreted their own and other people's behaviors—in friendship, marriage, public behaviour, electoral politics, and the politics of solidarity. In all these spheres and others, moments when one's expectations or aspirations are not met tend to elicit discourses of excruciating self-criticism, narratives of lament about the status of the middle class, and a sense of disillusionment about the world and with the promises of one's national and class membership. Key to the argument here is the central place accorded to the Argentinian middle class, particularly in the capital Buenos Aires, in [End Page 895] narratives of national progress and international development, whereby it stands as a synecdoche for the whole nation. The book's five substantive chapters illustrate the historical sensibility of routine crisis in Argentina, its emergence, and how it operates at different scales. The first chapter discusses public discourses on the middle class prior to, during, and after the 2001–2002 financial crisis. It traces the emergence of what Muir calls "the middle-class consensus," a structure of feeling and habitual interpretive practices that came to define middle-class subjectivity. If the crisis as a historical event was experienced in vivo as chaos and disorder, later discursive practices on that event served to render this disorder meaningful. In this later representation, crisis became the "real" reality of Argentina that would rear its head every now and then. Moreover, the ability to see crises as the "really real" and any semblance of order simply as a veneer came to be constitutive of middle-class subjectivity. In this way, Muir argues, members of the middle-class could assure themselves of their class membership through their practice of critique, or the ability to penetrate through orderly appearances to reveal the ugly reality that lurks behind them. The rest of the chapters develop and elaborate on this core argument. Further, Chapter 2 situates the sensibility of the Argentinian middle class in the context of a longue durée history of the country's political economy and public culture, particularly in relation to two salient genres of critical interpretation, psychoanalysis, and conspiracy theory, both of which produce a suspicious form of critique that questions its own efficacy. Chapter 3 situates their sensibility in the context of the devaluation of the national currency during the crisis. The last two chapters look at how the suspicious sensibility of the middle class informed their interpretations of their daily lives at the time of Muir's fieldwork (2003–2007). Chapter 4 focuses on corruption as a folk concept by which the middle class apprehends the apparent loss of virtue, even the ability to know what virtue is, in Argentina. Middle-class Argentinians, Muir argues, see themselves as compulsive participants in their own national and personal undoing by simultaneously condemning corruption and taking a certain pleasure in it—a situation that she calls "historical exhaustion." The final chapter shows how even social initiatives that seek to...

“What’s in the middle”: Scratching beneath the surface of the middle class(es) in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Turkey and Vietnam

The term “middle class” is increasingly used to qualify the mass of people in developing countries who are neither poor nor rich and share consumption patterns historically associated with the western middle class. However, what differentiates them from the ideal-typical middle class, as well as the extent to which emerging middle classes differ across developing countries, has only been marginally documented by economists to date. This article proposes to scratch beneath the surface of the so-called middle-class that is burgeoning in developing countries by documenting the commonalities and differences hidden by the all-encompassing term of “middle class” for a set of developing countries exhibiting different levels of income, economic structures and socio-political systems: Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Turkey and Vietnam. Relying on quantitative and qualitative micro-economic data, our paper compares the objective characteristics (occupation, education, income), behavior and subjective expectations of the people standing in the middle of the income distribution in the four countries. Four main research questions structure the paper. Where is the middle? How is the middle specific? Who is in the middle? What does the middle aspire to? Results show that the middle-income group in each country covers distinct realities. Although some similar characteristics and behaviors are observable, our results reveal a strong heterogeneity within each national middle class, with no fewer than four to seven socio-economic subgroups, and strong country-specific traits as most of the subgroups are deeply rooted in the country’s specific historical trajectory. In each country, our analysis also unveils a pattern of bipolarization between a rather affluent and stable middle class and a “new” or more vulnerable one. Finally, middle class members appear to be characterized by an individualist positioning and the absence of a marked political commitment, challenging the common assumption that developing countries’ middle classes are agents of political change.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the Consumerist Utopia

ABSTRACT Twenty-six years ago, Aditya Chopra’s film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) biblicized the neoliberal romantic fantasies of India and the global Indian diaspora with an adventurous romantic plot, against the backdrop of diasporic and ethnic settings, global brand placements and émigré Indians embodying traditional values. Reviewing the film’s mediascapes as an index of India’s middle-class subjectivity through the prism of neoliberal consumer culture, this paper illustrates how it merchandized desire as a global utility. It anchored a consumerist patriarchy as a motif of gender empowerment and the patriarchal and corporate logic of representing individual liberty. My assessment correlates to the history of India’s economic liberalization, suggesting that the film’s material unconscious allegorizes the deficit between approved and realized indexes of capital inflows by the end of the ‘90s. While DDLJ promulgated the promise of a virtual repatriation of expatriate Indians, its promise of gender equality and modern citizenship dwelled in collaboration with dominant social structures and consumerist ideologies that would, ultimately, personify emancipation as consuming subjects of global capital.

“Professionals, Merchants, and Industrialists Unite!”: Middle-Class Masculinities, Subjectivities, and Nationhood in Chile, 1932–1952

This article focuses on the formation of the masculine ethos of the middle classes in Chile as a result of their experience in the public sphere and covers the period between 1932 and 1952. The study is based on a discourse analysis of Acción Pública, a middle-class weekly; ANEF magazine, issued by the Asociación Nacional de Empleados Fiscales (Chile’s National Association of Public Servants, ANEF); En Viaje, the magazine published by Chile’s state-owned railway; and Ley 6020 Sueldo Vital (Living Wage Act), legislation benefitting white-collar workers. The article provides an examination of the impact of everyday nationalism on the formation of modern middle-class men identities and explores the extent to which the intersection between expectations of class, labor, and gender led to profound contradictions that may be considered subjectivities of both class and masculinity.

Language in the middle: Class and sexuality on the Hinglish continuum

AbstractThis article draws from ethnographic research among youth in Delhi's expanding middle classes to call for more sociolinguistic attention to the role played by sexuality discourse in the reproduction of class relations. The discussion highlights the centrality of the middle classes to sustaining as well as shifting sexual normativity, suggesting that sexual norms are in part constituted through everyday discourses that situate middle class subjectivity between two class extremes. Specifically, the article tracks how Hinglish, as a mixed‐language alternative to a class system polarized by English and Hindi, came to rival English as the preferred language of sexuality, challenging the elite censorship of “vernacular” languages that began in nineteenth‐century colonialism. However, as demonstrated by two case studies of queer speakers at different ends of the Hinglish continuum, speakers of this internally diverse hybrid variety are not equally able to master the sexuality discourse that has become indexical of upward mobility.

Childhood drawing: The making of a deficit aesthetic

This article introduces and explores the concept of the deficit aesthetic. Particular attention is given to how the deficit aesthetic was made and the extent to which it continues to be sustained in early art education, especially in the United States. For many children, particularly at this time, the deficit aesthetic factors as yet another lingering obstacle to negotiate, one that re-centers the assumption of childhood drawing as a neutral practice for a natural child. As an interpretive frame, the deficit aesthetic distorts the experience of drawing by disempowering the child, decontextualizing their drawing, and re-prioritizing white Western and middle-class subjectivities.

Across regional disparities and beyond family ties: A Ghanaian middle class in the making

ABSTRACT Despite its fuzziness, the term middle class has become increasingly attractive in the past two decades, not only among social scientists and market analysts but also as a term of self-description employed by upwardly mobile individuals. Research on middle classes in the Global South, and especially in Africa, confronts us with particular challenges. First, while conventional class theories take the nation-state as the obvious framework for defining class boundaries, African examples point to the importance of sub-national (as well as transnational) dimensions of class formation. Secondly, marriage ties and kin relations of upwardly mobile individuals in African societies often cut across class boundaries, resulting in ‘multi-class’ families and competing loyalties. The paper addresses these challenges by looking at the emergence of a national middle class in Ghana. More specifically, we discuss how social mobility and class formation play out in two different regions of what is today Ghana: a coastal region that since the seventeenth century has been drawn into global networks and was highly stratified by the end of the nineteenth century; and a marginalized savannah region with an egalitarian society until chieftaincy and education were introduced by the British colonizers in the early twentieth century. These regional disparities and resulting sub-national memberships intersect with the emergence of a national middle class. However, we argue that despite distinct regional trajectories, we are currently witnessing a certain ‘synchronisation’ of social stratification and the formation of a broader middle class that understands itself not only in regional, but national terms.

From Date Rape Jeopardy to (Not) Drinking Tea: Consent Humour, Ridicule and Cultural Change

This article traces a cultural shift in ‘consent humour’ by contrasting a Saturday Night Live skit that aired in 1993 mocking affirmative consent with the 2015 ‘Tea and Consent’ video produced by the Thames Valley police, in 2015, which insists that ‘consent is everything’. By reflecting on the cultural contexts and the ‘humour ideologies’ that underlie these examples, the article rejects a simple teleological interpretation of cultural change. It asks who and what is subject to ridicule in these jokes, contrasting the figure of the disruptive ‘victim feminist’ in the 1993 sketch with the ignorant subject who is ‘still struggling’ with consent in the 2015 clip. The article argues that both rely on a class-based politics of cultural capital to defend ideological constructions of ‘appropriate knowledge’ about consent. Where the SNL skit insists that consent is marked by its complexity, the ‘Tea and Consent’ video insists on its simplicity. The humour in both, however, rests on a sexually sophisticated middle-class subject laughing at those who do not possess the appropriate cultural capital in relation to sex and consent. In both cases, the ‘problem’ of consent is deflected away from normative heterosexuality and towards the ignorant other.

Aspiring, Ambivalent, Assertive: Bulgarian Middle-Class Subjectivities and Boundary Work through Migration

This article investigates the subjectivities of a group of aspiring middle-class Bulgarians and their boundary work in the context of their migrations to the United Kingdom. Drawing on Lamont’s critique of Bourdieu’s theory on class formation and reproduction, it shows how people from underprivileged social backgrounds can lay claims to middleclassness by strategically drawing on cultural and moral markers of distinction revolving around the notions of “civilization,” “culturedness,” and the “West.” The adoption of such narratives and their enactment in the cultivation of personal attributes, however, fails to guarantee full-fledged middle-class membership for people who lack the necessary economic and social capital. Thus, boundary-building becomes the key mechanism for negotiating ambivalent middle-class subjectivities and rejecting objectively assigned positions in the social structure. The article traces the emergence of ideal-type models of middle-class belonging since 1989, their adoption by aspirational middle-class people, and the boundary work and self-differentiation by which they try to reassert their superior status both before during and after their migrations to the UK. It concludes that the observed everyday processes of group classification through the defining of and distancing from cultural, moral, and racial “others” reproduces class antagonisms that preclude a more critical understanding of the discontents of Bulgaria’s capitalist transition.

From Making the Glory to Facing the Decay

What were the main characteristics of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hungarian collective identity and memory political debates? They were no longer determined by the discourse of liberal-rights-extending assimilation, yet public speech was also not entirely determined by the ethnicist–essentialist subject matter of the interwar national characterology discourse; rather, the internal dilemma of the rights-extending assimilation was externalized. There were some who sought to advance the extension of rights in the direction of suffrage. Others held on to rights extension in the hope of assimilation and believed they could promote it through establishing institutions of public education. Others abided by rights-extending assimilation, but interpreted it in terms of individual cultural achievements. Yet others believed that their fears of historical Hungary falling apart and the decay of the national middle class could be counterbalanced by curtailing or revoking nationalities’ rights and exclusionary policies against them. This article focuses on four different types of forging a collective identity: programmes, master narratives, political languages, strategies and regimes of memory.

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own:Stories from My Life Sarah Staes Introduction This article1 focuses on Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from my Life, an impressive compilation of (auto)biographical texts written throughout her literary career for very different occasions and published in 2015 by Random House. Not only does the compilation map out a significant part of Cisneros's personal trajectory, but it also displays the evolution of the cultural, social and linguistic self-consciousness of her authorial 'posture,' a concept developed by Jérôme Meizoz. As we will see, the collection foregrounds important events in the development of Cisneros as a Chicana author, topics that were already well known by those who read the poetry and fiction she published throughout her 40-year career: her growing up as a migrant, middle-class subject, the desire to write and live independently that clashed with the married life that her Mexican father had in mind for her, the discovery of and love for Mexican culture, the challenges of living between cultures and languages, and the increasing importance of her role as a canonical writer, feminist and cultural mediator. To both support and stress these motives, Cisneros displays the same particular multilingual strategies used in her other works, which have already been described in detail by Ernst Rudin (1996), Lourdes Torres (2007), María López Ponz (2009), María Laura Spoturno (2010) and An Van Hecke (2017) amongst others. Rather than identifying them, we aim to analyze how the (sometimes scarce, sometimes abundant) references to Spanish throughout the English texts increase the level of theatricality and sentimentalism described by Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976) as characteristic of melodrama. It is our hypothesis that this textual "melodramatic mode," which appeals to her readers' emotions and the image Cisneros constructs of herself outside the text, facilitates identification with her bicultural subjectivity rather than overcoming Mexican-American dualisms. [End Page 144] Multilingual situations vs. multilingual strategies in the U.S. Multilingualism has long been a common practice for human beings and societies. Two centuries ago, however, the relativist2 view of languages determining thoughts and the romantic myth of monolingualism started to extend deep into the foundations of the emerging modern nation-states. Individuals were said to have a singular primary language, an innate 'mother tongue,' as described by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813. This 'true language' was supposedly part of a common identity shared by fellow citizens of monolingual, homogeneous territories. The monolingual paradigm became the "theoretical foundation for territorialized, nation- and ethnicity-based language/identity" (Lvovich 520). The binary view of 'native' vs. 'foreign' persists, although this historical construct has been under pressure ever since its rather artificial implementation, as Yasemin Yildiz shows in her groundbreaking book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012). Describing the trajectories of five 20th- and 21st-century German writers, who in their literary productions attempt to reimagine "the identitarian force of language" (Yildiz 6), Yildiz labels their critical endeavors to challenge and overcome the limiting functioning of the monolingual paradigm 'the postmonolingual condition' (Yildiz 4). Aiming to move beyond their 'native' language, these modern multilingual writers can be categorized as 'translinguals,' a term coined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination (Kellman 16). These examples serve to demonstrate the tension between the still active monolingual paradigm and a fragmented cultural and linguistic reality which nowadays gains more visibility due to globalization, mass migration and common economies. In recent decades, interdisciplinary studies on the relationship between multilingualism and identity, culture, history and society have approached the monolingual paradigm with skepticism, actively unmasking the myth of monolithic, stable identities (Meylaerts 1). Scholars have come to agree that the relationships between a multilingual's languages and his/her sense of self must be approached carefully, taking into account that the connection between language and sense of self is not exclusively reserved for the 'mother tongue' and considering every case as an individual trajectory (Lvovich 520–521)3. Of special interest for the purposes of this research paper is the situation of the Chicano community in the United States, as Sandra Cisneros is internationally considered...

Postmaidan Ukraine: Middle Class in the Shadow of Reforms

The article is devoted to the research of dynamics of the social structure of Ukrainian society in the period after the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. The authors try to identify the leading tendencies of the middle class transformation, the basis for stability and guarantees of the irreversibility of democratic transformations in postmaidan Ukraine. The large-scale program of social transformation, proclaimed by the Ukrainian government (62 reforms), could not be implemented due to lack of essential resources, Russia's aggression in Donbas and an acute crisis of public trust to the government. The national middle class responded with quantitative reductions and qualitative changes in its composition. The factors influencing this process have been analyzed, in particular: the extraordinary concentration of large financial capital, genetically related to power; maintaining essential state regulation in the economy; increase of the share of social expenditures of the state in support for the lower stratum; increased migration activity of Ukrainians after obtaining a visa-free regime with the EU; social mobility in the labor market, precarization; reduction of working age rural population; influence of the informal (shadow) economy; decentralization of power; socio-political factors. It can be concluded that the middle class in postmaidan Ukraine has already realized its "social self," but cannot realize its activity-structural potential yet.

Нове значення середнього класу в умовах трансформації економіки і міграції трудових ресурсів (соціолого-політологічний аналіз)

In the 21st century, especially after the global crisis of 2007-2009, the emphasis is shifting to the problem of the need to form a new middle class, especially in the post-Soviet space, and not only since this problem has become relevant in the last decade even in the EU. Therefore, the subject of research is the state of development of the middle class problem, its new value and role in the consolidation of society (on the example of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries).The relevance and scientific novelty of the problem of the new middle class lies in the fact that this phenomenon to date, with some exceptions, in its new quality in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet countries as an object and subject is not researched enough, and therefore has no modern sufficient theoretical explanation both in terms of its role in individual countries and in the scale of the global world integration process.This is due to the fact that much of the post-Soviet researchers have come from a rather contradictory position that, in the context of globalization, the middle class of the Western sample will be formed with the peculiarities for each country, and the historical and socio-cultural characteristics will eventually be smoothed out. In fact, the post-Soviet republics inherited a layer of intellectuals, a working class and a peasantry, but the social structure of society very quickly by historical standards acquired a certain state of uncertainty at first, and then did not withstand the test of new time and got a new social borders and national features for each republic. However, the importance of the phenomenon of the middle class did not diminish, but rather, more clearly defined and increased to the level of the guarantor of stability of every society.The article attempts to prove that any society is able to maintain stability and even to ensure its development for a certain period of time: in one case by the efforts of rigid authoritarianism, as in Iraq and Libya in the times of Gaddafi and Hussein, in the other - by manipulations of the public consciousness, and in the third, more or less, depending on the specifics of the government and the stability of political power. But this is a temporary phenomenon, and any government, sooner or later, failing to ensure the formation and development of its national middle class, is unable to create the conditions for stability and development of the society for the long term and without inter-ethnic, social, inter-religious and other cataclysms ensure continuity and conflict-free transfer of political power. Subversion of concepts, inventing various social substitutes for the role of the middle class, based on social, cultural, national, religious, and even party formations, are only able to stretch the problem in time, to drive it deep, but not to ensure strong socio-economic stability and continuity in their society for a long time.

Reproducing Middle-Class Subjectivities: Educational Migration, Transnationalism, and British Nigerian Youth

Drawing on research with British Nigerian youth who were sent to boarding school in Nigeria, I argue that such movement, and the transnational practices that it engenders, serve as a family accumulation strategy and are central to reproducing middle-class subjectivities. Their transnational practices lead to the accumulation of cultural capital, in the form of educational qualifications and particular dispositions, and social capital, in the form of extended friendship networks. Parents endeavor to give their children the best educational and networking opportunities and, in so doing, distance them from places and people in London that they devalue and see as morally degenerate, yet paradoxically, it is their children's performance of Britishness that serves as a form of cultural capital and endows them with status in the eyes of their contemporaries at boarding school in Nigeria.