African Pentecostalism: v. I: Global Discourses, Migrations, Exchanges and Connections: The Collected Essays of Ogbu Uke Kalu

This book provides an excellent lens to view, interpret, and evaluate the Pentecostal experience in the African continent. Contrary to dominant Western perspectives on African Pentecostalism which sees it as a religious vehicle for Western global cultural influences in Africa, Kalu provides an alternative trans-national discourse that is sensitive to local identities, appropriations, and contestations of global processes. In essay after essay in this volume, he demonstrates the courage to blaze a new path, offer new, bold insights, render prevailing discourse obsolete, and set sail a new one in the treacherous academic waters by shifting the terms, accent, and drift of the old one. As this set of sixteen essays shows, he researched profusely, argued trenchantly, and thought and taught powerfully to change how African Pentecostalism is portrayed, interpreted, and situated both within Christianity and within African traditional religions. In all this, he is not simply correcting distorted scholarship, but also altering the way Africans are portrayed in Western scholarship.