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Paper short abstract:

This presentation provides a decolonial reading of Pentecostalism. It situates its development in Africa and Latin America in a broader history of ‘modernity’ (Quijano 2000), and it uses Anzaldua’s (2015) notion of Nepantla to think with and provide another reading of Pentecostal Christianity.

Paper long abstract:

The study of Pentecostal Christianity has flourished in regions such as Africa and Latin America since the 1980s. Scholars have emphasised its modernising effects in both regions due to processes of globalisation. Although some scholars have explored connections between both regions through transnational churches, the study of Pentecostalism in both regions seems to have remained mainly separate. Significant debates in this field continue to be dictated from and mediated through institutions and scholars working in the ‘Global North.’ However, we still need to develop analytical frameworks and theoretical tools that re-centre scholars and theories from the ‘South’ in studying this form of Christianity. The aim of this presentation is twofold. First, it situates the development of Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America in a broader history of ‘modernity’ (Quijano 2000). Second, it uses Anzaldua’s (2015) notion of ‘Nepantla’ to think with and provide another reading of Pentecostalism. It argues that this form of religion emerges from and speaks to conditions of ‘Nepantla’. In other words, it appeals to the postcolonial condition of people living ‘in-between’ on these two continents. In doing so, it provides structures for living, but it paradoxically reproduces the conditions of coloniality from which it emerges. This presentation wants to encourage new ways of thinking about this form of Christianity and to understand it within broader historical colonial entanglements that go back to 1492.