Experiencing Religion

At each of Graham’s revival meetings a modern, lived, and transnational community of faith formed, connecting believers to past and future crusades. By following the audience to the meetings themselves, this chapter shows how they experienced the “modern” faith that had featured prominently in the contemporary religious debates discussed in Chapter 1. In the complex interplay between the sacred and the profane in the meetings’ orchestration, this faith became tangible. At the revival meetings, relationships formed within the audiences, and through practices such as singing and praying participants contributed to the charging of the spiritual atmosphere that finally climaxed in the altar call. Several aspects of the revival meetings—the presence of international guests, the awareness of prayers being said around the world for those in attendance, and the translation and accessibility of conversation narratives—enhanced the feeling in audiences that they were part of the transnational community of Billy Graham’s followers.

‘Kyidug Manyom’: Transnational Migration, Belonging and Social Change in Mustang, Nepal

This paper explores transnational migration in and from Mustang, Nepal, a high-altitude region of the Himalayas, to understand how people who migrate and return reconstruct a sense of belonging to their birthplace. Narrative ethnography forms the core of this paper as we discuss the stories of four individuals from Mustang to explore the complex decision making around migration and the act of returning, permanently and cyclically. We build on theories of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘belonging,’ and emphasize the circular nature of migration, to argue that migratory journeys involve a continued evaluation of the social and economic realities of contemporary life at ‘home’—highlighting intergenerational tensions, ideas around cultural preservation, and a dynamic understanding of belonging in the context of a transnational community. Although financial need continues to be a primary driving force behind migration trends in Mustang, this paper acknowledges other factors that shape migration such as, family pressure and intergenerational tensions, and the infrastructural and technological developments that have made travel and communication easier and more reliable. Despite the widespread depopulation of Nepal’s highlands, we argue that many Mustangis who migrate remain committed to Mustang’s socioeconomic future, and nurture a connection to their ancestral homeland even as their transnational aspirations pull them away.

Transnational identification processes: An association of young business leaders

This article raises the question of how organisational identification emerges at distance and across cultural contexts. The question is explored in an empirical study of identification processes among Moroccan members of an international association that assemble young leaders and entrepreneurs in small- and medium sized companies. On the basis of a narrative analysis of interviews, observations, and documents, the article illustrates two mutually reinforcing identification processes: One is based on face-to-face social interaction with likeminded peers locally; another is imaginary in the sense that the Moroccan members envision members in other countries to be like themselves and what they aspire to become. This contributes to crosscultural management literature in three ways: first, the study adopts a transnational lens that shows the need to go beyond a national perspective and to explore identification at the intersection between the global and local; second, the study draws on concepts of imagined community (Anderson, 1983) and community of sentiments (Appadurai, 1996) to conceptualise the imaginary part of the identification processes, which transcends locality. Third, the study contributes methodologically by showing how the distinction between translocal and local narratives allows to analyse the interplay between an imagined transnational community and a local face-to-face community.

The East African Revival

The East African Revival was a renewalist movement that spread during the 1930s from Uganda and Rwanda into Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Congo , and South Sudan. It is known as the Balokole movement from the Luganda word for “saved ones” (wokovu in Swahili). Its members attempted to reform mission-initiated churches from within by emphasizing an internalized Christian faith, high ethical standards, strong bonds of corporate fellowship, and the prominence of lay leadership. Women were able to assert greater moral and spiritual authority within the Revival than had become common outside it. Its vision of a transnational community of Christians acted as a critique to ethnonationalist views current in East Africa in the mid-20th century. The same vision also influenced global evangelical movements. The Revival possessed a number of strands, although a strong mainstream element has influenced the historiography of the movement as a largely unified and cosmopolitan form of evangelical Christianity. The Revival maintained momentum into the 1990s and remains a pervasive influence on the language, morals, and spiritual practice of Protestant churches in East Africa, even as newer Pentecostal movements make an impact on the region.

Annetta T. Mills and the Origin of Deaf Education in China

As the first education institution enrolling deaf children in China, the Chefoo School for the Deaf (which will be called “Chefoo School” in the rest of this article) was originally established by the American missionary couple Charles R. Mills and Annetta T. Mills. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Chefoo School succeeded in attracting students across the country. For investigating Mills’s contributions to the proliferation of Chinese deaf education in a transnational context, this article will consist of the following three sections. The first section primarily discusses the early history of deaf education in China before the establishment of the Chefoo School in 1898. As early as the 1840s, Chinese elites had already gained firsthand knowledge of deaf education in the United States. Around the 1870s, American and French missionaries respectively proposed to establish a specific deaf school, which took care of deaf children in Shanghai but failed to provide special education to them. And then the second section of this article will examine Mills’s efforts to seek financial support from the transnational community of deaf education. The final section of this article will switch to Mills’s agenda of localizing deaf education in China, including training native teachers fostering the proliferation of deaf education in China and providing industrial training to Chinese deaf children.

PROBLEMATIZING HOME, BELONGING AND IDENTITY IN BINA SHARIF’S MY ANCESTOR’S HOUSE: A TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH

Since the 1990s, transnationalism, a as recent field of enquiry, has emerged as another theoretical lens through which we can look into the changing, evolving meanings of home, homeland, and belonging for international migrants. Studies of transnational migrants have focused upon varying aspects of the migrants’ lives: their ties with their kin; laws of naturalization in the host country, involvement in political organizations, the place of cultural iconography such as food, music, tradition in their daily lives. Because these transmigrants neither cut the ties to their countries of origin nor fully assimilate into the new culture of the host country, these immigrants fall under the rubric of transnationals However, transnational studies focusing upon the cross-border lives and activities of transnational subjects ignore the cross-cutting variables of gender, class, age, religion, ideology, period of immigration, citizenship status, different local sending contexts, which play a mediatory role in shaping notions of home, identity, community within even a single transnational community. In order words, it is not possible to talk about the transnationalism of a certain migrant group but of the heterogeneous make-up of transnationalisms, which differ even among the members of a transnational community at any given point in time. To understand the relationship between transnational migrants, and their conceptions of home and belonging, it is of vital importance to explore the specific circumstances of migration and how they influence conceptions of home. Secondly, the celebratory overtones of the transnational conditions of international migrants overlook the negative consequences of transnational lives such as the feelings of loss and dislocation inherent in cross border movements of transmigrants. Reading Pakistani-American Bina Sharif’s play My Ancestor’s House through a transnational lens, I would argue, brings a new insight into the literature on transnationalism by way of highlighting the non-homogenous, non-celebratory, and historically specific aspects of transnationalism in a global age.