ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the relationship between the diaspora and religion has been approached, before turning attention to current conceptualizations both of diaspora and of religion which offer ways to think anew about their relationship. Adopting a processual understanding of both terms, it subsequently engages with the questions of how religious practices, discourses or objects might activate or deactivate diasporas; how they might connect or disconnect diasporic subjects with multiple others around them; and how they might be transformed in the process. These processes are addressed by exploring enduring issues of identification and belonging among diasporic co-religionists, and how they play out spatially and temporally – through practices and claims of territorialization and de-territorialization, and of continuity and discontinuity. In the diasporic context of London, Kenyan Pentecostals simultaneously make claims of both continuity and discontinuity with the past.
