Suchergebnisse

This article seeks to explain the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Hong Kong and Singapore over the last few decades in the adaptation of Christianity to the secular urbanization experienced in the two cities. The author argues that Christian responses involve both the innovation of Christian territorial practices to meaningfully navigate and engage the planned city as well as community practices seeking to produce place-bound Christian community life. The author shows that the innovation was driven by the postcolonial aspirations of Christians reacting to state-led urbanization to resolve decolonization crises in the 1970s and 1980s. Local churches with differing theological beliefs experimented with various hybrid territorial-community spatial practices adapted to the respective urban contexts. When urban redevelopment was intensified by the respective states to transform Hong Kong and Singapore into global cities, the Christians contributed and participated in the reurbanization and globalization of the two cities.

This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contrary to conventional historiography which portrays Straits Chinese political identity as one of conservative loyalty to the Empire, I show that the Straits Chinese developed multiple and hybrid political identities that were postcolonial in character, which would later influence the politics of decolonisation and nation-building after the war.

The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the secularizing spaces free up religious practitioners from the constraints of their traditions to innovate new practices to sacralize the urban spaces, in which the new conceptions of the urban play a crucial role. The direction and content of the innovations are driven by the aspirations of the religious practitioners with regard to the city and this provokes sacred politics challenging the state and capitalist market and aspirational contests to claim and control urban spaces vis-a-vis religious competitors, in which practitioners make use of state-market processes to do so.