III Conference of The Italian Association for African Studies - Panel on "African Christianity: social and spatial mobility through conversion and re-birth"

In the last thirty years Pentecostalism has been pervading the African continent, affirming itself as a religion conducive to social and spatial mobility: the vast literature on the issue highlights how the Pentecostal born again experience represents a ritual and narrative dispositive that contributes to the formation of moral and political subjects particularly inclined to face and assume the risks of change. The goal of the panel is to analyse the relationship between Pentecostalism and social and spatial mobility in Africa from two perspectives. The first perspective aims at investigating the itineraries of transformation and upward mobility within transnational Pentecostal networks among the countries of the so called “emerging Africa” or “African lions” and the contexts of diasporas and migration. The second perspective aims at retracing, through archives and oral sources, the historical relations between Christian movements and African agency in the context of power relations within colonial and post-colonial situations. Thus, the panel aims at contributing, on the one side, to analyse the relation between social and spatial mobility and Christian effervescence in Africa and, on the other side, to explore historical continuities and ruptures within this relation

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