Embodying a Hybrid Habitus: Identity Construction and Social Mobility among Working-class Black Women

Navigating the London-French Transnational Space: The Losses and Gains of Language as Embodied and Embedded Symbolic Capital

“…cit., p. 107) by which speech is apprehended 'symbolically through the veil of rhetorical illusion' (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964, p. 75) and, as such, alchemically transformed from linguistic matter into rateable semiotic resource, that I examine below 4 . Additional Bourdieusian concepts to be applied to the analysis are the potential for a 'cleft habitus' (Bourdieu 2004;Thatcher and Halvorsrud 2016) or hybrid habitus (Decoteau 2013;Pulley and Whaley 2020), resulting from the force of the transnational field on participants' linguistic habitus, notably, the disconcerting hysteresis sensation triggered by the mismatch between the external field and their embodied dispositions. While Bourdieu defines the cleft habitus as a painful splitting of the self, caused by a tension between the primary and secondary habitus, from twofold socialisation or from '"double structural constraints"' (Bourdieu 1997, p. 190), it is relevant that Nicola Ingram and Jessie Ingram and Abrahams (2016) do not conceive of a cleft habitus as necessarily alienating and negative.…”

“…In the following and final subsection, I take this transnational and translingual positioning a step further and ask whether the complex repertoires, (self-)identifications and spatialities implicated in London-French languaging take us beyond the notions of the 'cleft habitus' (Bourdieu 2004), of linguistic hybridity (Li 2018) and even the 'hybrid habitus' (Decoteau 2013;Pulley and Whaley 2020), to a post-structural 'third space' (Bhabha 1994) that transcends traditional dualisms and, as such, reflects the more porous lived experience of the migrants.…”

“…Although the narratives examined above led us towards a utopian third space, performed by the comfortable inhabiting of the English language and the easy embracing of two linguistically shaped personalities, the migrants' framing of these selfhoods in dualistic terms to some extent undermines the 'trans' ideal and accentuates the hybridity of their evolving habitus (Decoteau 2013;Pulley and Whaley 2020). Not encapsulating a cleft habitus per se, the migrants' identities nonetheless remain in 'flux' (Elliott 2008, p. 140), susceptible to the pressures exerted by the postmigration field.…”

“…This conversion of symbolic capital gain to symbolic capital loss translates into othering and exclusion from previously strong affective bonds. Finally, I ask whether the translanguaging practices of the London-French diaspora transcend the notion of the 'cleft habitus' (Bourdieu 2004;Thatcher and Halvorsrud 2016), or even that of hybridity (Li 2018) or the hybrid habitus (Decoteau 2013;Pulley and Whaley 2020), by gesturing towards a post-structural conception of language as a borderless phenomenon (Otheguy et al 2015) that disrupts national, lexical and disciplinary divides (Cacciatore and Pepe 2019;Seloni 2019). Or is it an ideal borne of a transnational epistemology at odds with the ontological vécu of the migrants themselves?…”