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Accepted Paper:

Growing Up African in Australia: Pentecostalism and the Everyday Politics of  
Richard Vokes (University of Western Australia) Cristina Rocha (Western Sydney University) Kathleen Openshaw (Western Sydney University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the religious experience of migrant African-Australian women living in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. For all of them, their Christian faith, and their participation in Pentecostal-charismatic (P/c) churches, have played a key role in helping them to make sense of their migration experiences, and to navigate the multiple political fields in which they are located.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the religious experience of African-Australian women living in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. From 2001 onwards, an increasing number of Africans have migrated to Australia, a majority of them as refugees from East African conflict zones, a smaller percentage as education, ‘skilled migrant’ (i.e. professional), and business entrants. For the women we have interviewed – as part of an Australian Research Council-funded project on African Christianities in Australia – these journeys were mostly made when they were young children, such that the complexities of their migration and settlement experiences have been overlaid with the the everyday challenges of growing up, and of becoming women. For all of them, these complexities have been further exacerbated by the variegated, and overlapping, political dynamics of their own Diasporic communities – whether Burundian, Congolese, Rwandese, etc. – of being ‘African’ in Australia, and of being Black (in a more cosmopolitian sense). For all of them, their Christian faith, and their participation in (usually multiple) Pentecostal-charismatic (P/c) churches, have played a key role in helping them to make sense of their experiences, and to navigate the (at times treacherous) political fields in which they find themselves. As an intervention into recent debates in the Anthropology of Christianity, we argue that in this context the appeal of P/c Christianity may lie less in its promise of moving ‘upwards’, so much as in the possibilities it affords as a set of ‘tactics’ for making sense of, and for navigating, within and between complex political fields.

Out of support for our research interlocutors, who like many Black people across the world experience everyday systemic racism, we also offer this paper in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter.

Panel P181
Religion, (im)mobilities and citizenship in the face of populism
  Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -