Abstract
This chapter sheds light on discourses developed by Pentecostal leaders regarding their ability to (re)produce emotionally-based narratives associated with the vicissitudes faced by African migrants within wider South African and Spanish society. By analysing narrative activities such as counselling, sermons, preaching, life testimonies and church leaders’ life journeys I explore their articulation of the tensions in migrants’ integration processes. Such geographically distinct cases unveil the multiple ways African Pentecostal discursive and symbolic tools generate shared belonging within a (de)localised ‘community of sentiment’. These communities rest at the ‘social interstices’ of South Africa and Spain where African migrants experience similar forms of exclusion and marginalisation; navigating through pastors’ universal and particularistic approaches, the church community (e)merges along with emotions and sentiments relating migrants’ vital quests for belonging.
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Notes
- 1.
The nationalities of pastors interviewed (Nigerian and Congolese) were initially not considered as a variable for the sample but instead emerged from the general selection of cases carried out in Spain by the snow-ball sampling method. In the second phase, I decided to establish these nationalities as part of the criteria for selecting cases in South Africa.
- 2.
Translation of ‘Pueblo gitano’; although the Roma people is known for being the hegemonic ethnic group amongst the Spanish gypsies, the usage of the term ‘gypsies’ have been preferred in the recent literature, as well as amongst the Roma (cf. Canton 2001).
- 3.
Source: Ikuspegi—Observatório Vasco de Inmigración. Población Africana en la CAPV, n 51, noviembre 2013.
- 4.
0.3 per cent and 1.6 per cent, respectively (ibid.).
- 5.
Less than 1 per cent of migrants come from these countries (ibid.).
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Cazarin, R. (2018). Pentecostalism and a Global Community of Sentiment: The Cases of Nigerian and Congolese Pastors in Diaspora. In: Bakewell, O., Landau, L. (eds) Forging African Communities. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58194-5_11
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