1431 Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 134 (July 2009) On Identity and Faith in the Global Political Economy James R. Cochrane 1 ABSTRACT Considering what we mean by identity today, how this plays itself out at macro-level in the African context, and what this has to do with religion or faith, means taking into account the political economy of globalization and its effects on faith and religion A good place to start is with Klaus Nürnberger's Prosperity, Poverty and Pollution, which pays painstaking attention to economics on the one hand, and the judgement of faith about it, thereby binding the personal and the public Though always so, contemporary patterns of globalization make clearer than ever the integrity andfragilityof the self facing a multiplicity of other selves and increasingly, its own hybrid character Similarly, identity in Africa is equally multiple, hybrid, and the borders that shape identity are both imposed historically and rapidly shifting now Thus the question of identity has arisen anew under the rubric of the "African Renaissance" This idea is probed, with a view to asking what it might mean in relation to a recovery of religion in African (or other) identities The argument connects local and translocal or global identities, by focusing on three aspects of contemporary reality that affect or express new forms of religion and faith in Africa virtuahty, distributive power, and mobility The overall conclusion is that we need formative narratives, something less than a master narrative but greater than a merely particulanst narratives, that may speak of a unity that incorporates difference Faith, it is suggested, offers many people just such a formative narrative when it mcludes the critical or 'prophetic' capacity to challenge the politics of abstraction and disempowerment which globalization so often represents, in the name of the concrete hfeworlds of ordinary people Faith and identity both have an unsettled and unsettling recent history. Narratives of faith have reasserted themselves in a wide varitety of forms (including unprecedented acts of violence) against the hegemony of a secular scientific culture and instrumentalized political economy; narratives of identity experienced as hybrid, shifting and unstable, have found expression in numerous academic disciplines, literary genres and media productions. Arguably, the central thematic that binds these narratives lies in the rubric of globalization, an imprecise concept 1 Some elements of this essay were first presented as "Globalization, 'African Renaissance' and Contested Identités," at the 5th International Conference on The Conflict of Civilizations between West and East, Moscow, April 2001, withfinancialsupportfromthe National Research Foundation, who naturally bear no responsibility for its contents James R. Cochrane teaches in the Centre for the Study of Religion, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town. <cochrane@humanities.uct.ac.za>