David Garbin

Competing visions of identity and space: Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain

Abstract This article explores the role of politics in public debates about what it means to be a Bangladeshi Muslim in contemporary Britain. It examines the history of Bangladeshi community activism, tensions at work in the political arena, and the part played by Islamist leaders and organisations. It grounds this analysis not only in Tower Hamlets, the ‘heartland’ of the community, but also in Oldham and Birmingham where there are substantial, if scantily researched, concentrations of British Bangladeshis. Through a study of the competing visions of identity and space, this article explores the ways in which secular and religious leaders seek to represent their community in the public sphere. It also discusses the ways in which local political dynamics are shaped by (mainly ideological and social) transnational networks.

Territorial Stigma and the Politics of Resistance in a Parisian Banlieue: La Courneuve and Beyond

Drawing on research carried out in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve, this article contributes to the sociological analysis of urban marginalisation in post-riot France. Beginning with a discussion of the broad relationship between society and space, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational understanding of social space and how these complexities are inscribed in the urban, it moves on to consider how this relates to Lefebvre’s production of space thesis. The main body of the article outlines some of the ways in which territorial stigmatisation is imposed and reproduced. Empirical material is treated here as ‘diagnostic’ of the symbolic domination that blights La Courneuve. Yet this material is also illuminative of the irregular and scattered forms that resistance to territorial stigma takes. It is suggested that the complex relationship between social and physical space is expressed through the construction of symbolic geographies of domination/resistance and negotiated through intricate ‘entanglements of power’.

The Visibility and Invisibility of Migrant Faith in the City: Diaspora Religion and the Politics of Emplacement of Afro-Christian Churches

In todays 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 the 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.

Marching for God in the global city: Public space, religion and diasporic identities in a transnational African church

Taking the London-based brass band of a transnational Congolese church (the Kimbanguist church) as a case study, this article explores how the sonic, visible and embodied experience of religion in the public space is linked to the politics and poetics of diasporic belongings. These public performances enable Kimbanguists to claim a place and a space in the city while ‘emploting’ a particular vision of self and others in the pluralised environment of the diaspora. After discussing the literature on urban religious parades and processions, the article addresses the wider implications of the sacralisation of space and public performance of faith in terms of urban but also post-colonial centre/periphery dialectics. Finally, it reflects on the construction of diasporic and ethnic identities as well as the reinterpretation of Kimbanguist religiosity among second-generation Congolese youth in the British context.

Introduction: Believing in the city

The papers in this special issue of Culture and Religion were presented during the 2-day workshop ‘Religion, Culture and Materiality’ organised under the auspices of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for Research on Sociocultural Change Urban Experiments strand and held at the Open University, UK, on 27 and 28 April 2011. Participants of this workshop discussed the materiality of religion in different spatial and temporal contexts. How does materiality impact the ways in which the sacred is experienced and understood? What is the ‘shape’ that religious materiality (and immateriality) takes across various time-spaces? Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, what is the place of religion in contemporary urban societies? There has been a growing interest in this ‘urbanity’ of religion and the ways in which religious material presence may refashion and alter contemporary cityscapes. We have been encouraged to think not only about the meaning and relevance of post-secular modernity/modernities (see Beaumont and Barker 2011) but also about the new politics and poetics of territorialised religious identities and cultures in metropolises of both the Global North and the Global South (see the ongoing international project ‘Global Prayers’ – http:// globalprayers.info). Religious place-making – the appropriation and experiencing of space through various religious activities – is clearly a multidimensional process. It is also inherently multi-scalar, if we consider, for instance, how embodiment and emplacement are intimately articulated (Tweed 2006), or how material, ethereal and spiritual spheres can be bridged in the different localised and globalised contexts bound up with the religious experience (Vásquez 2009). This grounding and ‘production’ of religious space (see Knott 2005) – through the conception, representation and lived experience of the sacred – has been increasingly explored in relation to the presence of migrants and minorities in large cities. As Endelstein, Fath, and Mathieu (2010, 11) point out, far from disappearing or becoming ‘diluted’ within the urban fabric of late modernity, the adaptation, accommodation, reterritorialisation and ‘recomposition’ (rather than decomposition) of ‘migrant religion’ are a salient phenomenon. Many have noted that the persistence of a significant social, cultural and political role of religion

‘Saving the Congo’: transnational social fields and politics of home in the Congolese diaspora

Abstract This paper explores the diasporic ‘politics of home’ of Congolese migrants in Europe, in particular in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Belgium. We focus on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the diasporic political sphere by examining the role of first generation activists, religious groups, as well as youth and womens organisations. Within the transnational political field, first generation leaders are in a dominant position and the involvement of other groups, such as women and young people is marginalised by their control of the diasporic ‘rules of the game’ in the Bourdieusan sense. However, the increasing involvement of Congolese women in the field of womens rights advocacy has opened up new paths of political action which can, in certain occasions, lead to transnational forms of engagement. Similarly, second generation Congolese activists are constructing a space of autonomous engagement, relying heavily on the Internet and especially on social media, some attempting to link up with wider social movements. The paper provides an understanding of the social and political construction of these different fields of diasporic engagement as well as their intersectional and dialogical relations.

‘Central London under siege’: Diaspora, ‘race’ and the right to the (global) city

Drawing upon an ethnography of recent Congolese diasporic protests in central London, this article pays attention to the traversal histories of ‘race’ and the postcolonial dynamics that precede the emergence of a contemporary diasporic ‘right to the city’ movement. The authors critically engage with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ as a way of explaining how the urban is not only the site but also, increasingly, a stake in urban protests. In doing so the authors relocate urban centrality – its meaning, symbolic power and heuristic status in protests – in a context where activists’ claims are not restricted to one city or, simply, the political present. Rather, protestors talk about making geopolitical connections between local and global scales and contemporary and historical injustices. Drawing upon Simone’s notion of ‘black urbanism’, the authors claim to enrich Lefebvre’s original formulation by unpacking the complex performative dimensions of protest as they intersect with race and, more specifically, blackness and postcolonialism. It is concluded that activists’ experience is fundamentally ambivalent; they are at once enchanted and disenchanted with protest in central London.

Sacred remittances: money, migration and the moral economy of development in a transnational African church

ABSTRACT While remittances have come to play an important part in debates about migration and development, the link between religion, migration and transnational financial flows has yet to be understood in its full complexity. Drawing upon a multi-sited ethnography of a transnational African church, this article addresses this overlooked dimension of migrant transnationalism by analysing how religious donations converted into ‘sacred remittances’ produce a moral economy of religious life shaped by a politics of belongings at various scales. The article discusses the social meaning that diasporic actors attach to religious donations sent to the homeland (the Congo) and how this compares to the practice of sending remittances to family members. The article also argues that transnational circulation of sacralised money operates within a field of meanings and practices associated with moral expectations, entitlements and differentiated regimes of value. Sacred remittances, as ‘global money’, may generate a diversity of transnational linkages between donors and recipients but they remain embedded in landscapes of status and power.