Routes and Rites to the City: Introduction

Abstract

This book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg. By mobility, we refer to not only transnational and intra-national migration but also movements of commodities, ideas and forms, the traffic of objects, sounds and colours within the city. By taking this approach, we aim to re-theorize religion and urban super-diversity (Vertovec 2007, 2015): here super-diversity is viewed not simply in terms of the plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups, but conceived in terms of the multiple movements and enclosures through which religion produces and permeates urban space . The relationship between religion, mobility and urbanization involves both temporal and spatial diversity and the shifting borders of spatial production, belonging and exclusion . This is a constant process of territorialization and de-territorialization of physical, aesthetic and symbolic forms of the city. We argue here that while religion allows for a sense of belonging and capacitates movement, freedom and aspiration in the city, it is also complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.