Visibility and invisibility of migrant faith in the city: diaspora religion and the politics of emplacement of Afro-Christian churches (forthcoming in: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies)
by David GARBIN
forthcoming in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS)
In today’s post-industrial city, migrants and ethnic minorities are forming, through their religious practices,... more
In today’s post-industrial city, migrants and ethnic minorities are forming, through their religious practices, particular spaces of alterity, often at the ‘margin’ of the urban experience, for instance in converting anonymous warehouses into places of worship. This paper examines diverse facets of the religious spatiality of Afro-Christian diasporic churches - from local emplacement to more visible public parade of faith in the urban landscape. One of the aims is to explore to what extent particular spatial configurations and locations constitute ‘objective expression’ of social status and symbolic positionalities in the post-migration secular environment of the ‘host societies’. Without denying the impact of urban marginality, the paper shows how religious groups such as African Pentecostal and Prophetic churches are also engaged, in their own terms, in a transformative project of spatial appropriation, regeneration and re-enchantment of the urban landscape. The case study of the Congolese Kimbanguist church in London and Atlanta also demonstrates the need to examine the articulation of local, transnational and global practices and imaginaries to understand how religious and ethnic identities are renegotiated in newly ‘localised’ diasporic settings.
Keywords:
Diaspora religion - African churches - Urban space – Pentecostalism - Kimbanguism
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Seen by: and 23 morePublic Space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence
Springer, S. 2011. Public Space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 43 (2), 525-562.
In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article... more In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.
