Short Abstract

This panel explores how religious movements in Africa reshape territories, cross and create frontiers, and envision ways of inhabiting space in colonial and postcolonial times. It asks how religious place-making produces forms of belonging, moral and political governance, autonomy, and contestation.

Long Abstract

This panel examines how past and present forms of religiosity in Africa have taken root in particular places, transforming them, or have crossed geographical and identitarian frontiers whose meaning they have redefined. Religious conversion transforms not only believers, but also their places of life and how they are inhabited. Recent studies on urbanization and religious infrastructures have likewise explored how religiosity reshapes urban space.

Building on these approaches, the panel connects the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of religious phenomena with their material, aesthetic, and territorial transformations. The notion of the frontier is central: religious forms have crossed existing frontiers while creating new ones, imagining alternative ways of inhabiting and governing spaces. Examples range from anticolonial messianic movements such as Kimbanguism and Kitawala, which colonial administrations could not confine within an “ethnic” territory, or contemporary Sufi shrines, Pentecostal cities, and other religious landscapes.

We investigate the plasticity of frontiers—material and administrative, but also symbolic, moral, and political—and how they are drawn, reappropriated, and contested. How are they negotiated between religious groups, local communities, and (post)colonial states? How do religious territorialities reactivate or produce new memories, redefining boundaries of belonging? How can crossing administrative boundaries or creating new religious spaces enable actors to escape coercive logics, generate forms of moral governance, and forge new spaces of subjectivation?

We welcome empirically grounded contributions on urban or rural contexts in Africa and its diasporas that help us think of religious spaces, where old and new distinctions and forms of belonging are negotiated.

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