Transcultural Discourses of the ‘Unwanted’: African Migrants’ Pentecostal Constructs of Belonging in Australia

This paper examines how Ghanaian Pentecostal migrants in Sydney generate transcultural religious discourses that negotiate belonging, contest racialized marginalization, and reframe their presence in Australia as spiritually purposeful. Drawing on long‑term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2023) with the Sydney branch of the Church of Pentecost International Australia Incorporated (CoPIAI), the paper argues that migration catalyzes new cultural and religious formations that exceed national, ethnic, and doctrinal boundaries. Through discursive strategies such as interpreting crises as “Signs of God,” adapting witchcraft narratives to Australian sociopolitical realities, and reconfiguring local Pentecostal prophecies of national revival, migrants construct hybrid identities that bridge Ghanaian cosmologies and Australian contexts. Engaging transcultural theory, discourse analysis, and reverse discourse, the paper demonstrates how migrants creatively retool homeland idioms and hostland imaginaries to produce new moral worlds, ritual practices, and forms of belonging. This case illuminates transculturalism as a lived, embodied process central to African diasporic religious life.