The Material Dynamics of a London-French Blog: A Multimodal Reading of Migrant Habitus

Through a fine-grained reading of a London-French blog, this article aims to shed light on the lived experience of the French community in London. The ethnosemiotic conceptual framework brings together ethnographic and semiotic schools of thought, focusing in particular on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotic analytical model. Habitus is broken down into its material manifestations of habitat, habit and habituation, all displayed in the blog and revealing of the blogger’s identity and positioning within the migration setting. As all modes are considered to be of equal semiotic potential, equivalent emphasis is placed on the multiple modes of meaning-making present in the blog, such as layout, colour, typography and language. By examining the dynamic relationships between blogger and audience, subjectivity and objectivity, on-line and on-land habitus, and intermodal dynamics themselves, through the prism of multimodality, hidden facets of the blogger’s cultural identity and sense of community belonging within the diasporic context begin to materialise.

A Migrant Culture on Display: The French Migrant and French Gastronomy in London (19th – 21st centuries)

The large contemporary French migrant population – estimated by the French Consulate at around 300,000–400,000 in the UK, the majority living in London and the South-East – remains ‘absent’ from studies on migration, and, in a study of migrant food history in Britain, is considered not to have left traces as a migrant community. Over the centuries, the presence of various French communities in London has varied significantly as far as numbers are concerned, but what does not change is their simultaneous ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ in accounts of the history of the capital: even when relatively ‘visible’ at certain historical moments, they still often remain hidden in its histories. At times the French in London are described as a ‘sober, well-behaved […] and law-abiding community’; at other times they ‘appeared as a foreign body in the city’. This article reflects on the dynamics at play between a migrant culture associated with high cultural capital (so much so that is often emulated by those who are not French) and the host culture perception of and relationship to it, in order to consider what this may ‘mean’ for the French (and Francophone) migrant experience. French gastronomy and culinary knowledge is taken as an example of material culture and of cultural capital ‘on display’ specifically in the activity of dining out, especially in French restaurants, or in those influenced by French gastronomy. The social activity of dining out is replete with displays of knowledge (linguistic, culinary), of cultural literacy, of modes of behaviour, of public identity, and of rituals strictly codified in both migrant and host cultures. Dining out is also an emotional and politically-charged activity, fraught with feelings of suspicion (what is in the food? what does the chef get up to in the kitchen?) and of anxieties and tensions concerning status, class and gender distinctions. This article considers the ways in which the migrant French citizen of London may be considered as occupying an ambiguous position at different times in history, simultaneously possessing cultural capital and needing to negotiate complex cultural encounters in the connections between identity and the symbolic status of food in food production, food purveying and food consumption.