ABSTRACT
Identity is eternally unstable. Identities alternate, transcend, and (re)emerge. Occasionally, however, they fall into stasis. The tension inherent in identity then is a struggle between belonging and becoming (see Badenhorst 2015), and this struggle is perhaps best demonstrated through the organic phenomenon of migration and the manner it throws identities into question. Home, the desire for rootedness and stability, or belonging, is a notion that only the uprooted can deeply comprehend, writes Wallace Stegner (1971), and so it is for good reason that contemporary discussion on the relationship between migration, language, and religion consistently focuses on this triad as resource for the sustenance of both minority migrant identity, belonging, community, and cultural values (Warner and Wittner 1998; Hagan and Ebaugh 2003; Levitt 2003; Williams 2008; Vàsquez and Knott 2014) as well as emergent, expanded forms of social becoming. In the localized safe spaces of church, mosque, and temple, new immigrants find the support of networking relationships where life skills, stories, and existential narratives of faith are exchanged at times and reinterpreted at others. Shared social practices also come to serve as a means of belonging while becoming in the liminal space occupied by the skilled migrant worker, retiree, or economic or political refugee: those generally seeking an anticipated good life out of own accord (Bakewell 2008), or – as will become apparent in the ensuing case studies – both those who migrate out of free choice with an intent to serve as well as those who have been relocated by force. Yet, can the religious beliefs and practices of migrants – ‘religions on the move’ (Adogame, Gerloff, and Hock 2008: 1) – be demonstrated to exercise larger long-term historical effects upon the socio-political landscapes of those host territories within which migrants settle and, if so, what role does language as mobile resource (Blackledge and Creese, this volume) play in this process? This chapter asserts that the religious belief of the migrant serves as a ‘host’ for the transport of embedded ideologies that have historically transformed the societies into which the migrant has settled.
