THE POLITICS OF CLASS: EXPLORING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN BEHOLD THE DREAMERS BY IMBOLO MBUE

Abstract

Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers, published in 2016, uses the story of a Cameroonian immigrant family in New York City to examine how class, race, and immigration status interact to shape economic outcomes in America. Set against the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the novel follows Jende and Neni Jonga as they pursue stability and opportunity while working for Clark and Cindy Edwards, a wealthy family whose position exposes the distance between American promise and American structure. This article argues that Mbue constructs class not as a personal condition but as a structural one, produced and maintained by economic systems, racial hierarchies, and immigration law. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of capital, Thomas Piketty's analysis of wealth concentration, Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework of inter-sectionality, and empirical research on racial wealth gaps and immigrant economic mobility, this piece reads the novel as a precise literary account of how inequality operates at the interpersonal level. The analysis moves through five areas: class structure and economic hierarchy in the novel, the ideology of the American Dream and its limits, the mechanisms and boundaries of social mobility, and the intersection of race and immigration with class disadvantage. Each section grounds its reading in both textual evidence from the novel and scholarship from sociology, economics, and critical theory. The article finds that Mbue's novel resists sentimentality and ideology equally. It does not present poverty as ennobling or wealth as villainous. It presents both as positions within a system that rewards accumulation and penalizes vulnerability. The Jongas' eventual return to Cameroon is read not as defeat but as a rational response to structural reality. Behold the Dreamers contributes to African diaspora literature and American social fiction by making inequality visible through specific, human, and verifiable terms.