| Summary: | In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, stereotypes of Muslim migrants who pose a threat to
the French nation loom large. This article considers how communicative practices associated with
belonging in France shift with rising tensions surrounding Islam and immigration. By analyzing the
language used in state discourses on the one hand, and in conversations in Senegalese households on
the other, this article examines ‘integration' in France, both as a legal category and as a powerful
metapragmatic framework that mediates indexicality in everyday interactions. This article shows how
immigrants take part in the continual redefinition of what is required to ‘sound' integrated in attempts
to illustrate their belonging in France. It contends that French republican ideologies create an axis of
contrast between the ‘integrated' foreign-born and potentially problematic ‘immigrants,' revealing
how immigrants appropriate state discourses in their efforts to demonstrate their own integration. In
so doing, immigrants themselves produce nested hierarchies of belonging among France's immigrant
minority populations, in which Senegalese Catholics perform integration through critiques of
Muslims, while Senegalese Muslims denounce Islamic associations and others who are more pious in
public than they.
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