2014 Writing Religion in British Asian Diasporas (original) (raw)
Seeing a new opportunity for theoretical reflection on at least three decades of writing about British Asian cities, this chapter pursues the idea that the dimensions and properties of space are frequently configured in such a way that they re-inscribe dominant institutional and organizational formations of religion. A spatial approach allows for the recognition of demotic discourse and practice. Thus, we aim to reveal more clearly the particular sorts of work that the category of religion and its cognates do among differently positioned constituencies in British Asian cities, as well as assessing its potential to analyse changing patterns of diasporic consciousness and practice. We propose a new schema for the location of British Asian ‘religioning’ (Nye 2000) in terms of four distinctive, if interrelated, spatial scales and their related processes: i) the formation of neighbourhood congregations and ‘communities’ in the context of urban resettlement; ii) regulation and recognition by public institutions and the local/national state in multicultural politics and policy-making; iii) the networking and activism of transnational organizations which sustain both multi-, trans- and indeed supra-local circuits of religious connection and imagination; and iv) the informal and negotiated utterances and performativity of individuals and non-institutionalized collectives, which resist and sometimes critique the aforementioned dominant constructions of religion.
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