The Religious Encounters of the New African Diaspora in China and Malaysia: An Exploratory Study of Migratory Subjectivity and Ideological Mobility

Echoing the new African diaspora literature, this article demonstrates the importance of religious encounters in new African diasporic experiences, as they embody migratory subjectivity that is key to contemporary African migration and possibly leads to ideological mobility. We suggest that encountering the new religious situations should not be limited to person-to-person religious interactions but also take place between individual migrants and various (non-)religious institutions. In this sense, for various African Christian traders in China and a growing number of Nigerian Muslim students in Malaysia, encountering the Chinese religious regime and the Malaysian educational characteristics respectively renders different forms of migratory subjectivity and ideological mobility. Both case studies provide exploratory accounts of diasporic religious experience in societies where religious environments differ from widely-studied European and American contexts, thereby deepening our understandings of religion and the new African diaspora in a global context.