Illustrations; Acknowledgments; On Language; Chapter 1 -- The First Episode; Chapter 2 -- Cursing the City: The Ethnographic Field and the Pentecostal Imagination; Chapter 3 -- New Fathers and New Names: Social Dynamics in an Evangelizing Acting Group; Chapter 4 -- Variations on Divine Afflatus: Artistic Inspiration, Special Effects, and Sermons; Chapter 5 -- Mimesis in Motion: Embodied Experiences of Performers and Spectators; Chapter 6 -- The Right Road: Moral Movements, Confessions, and the Christian Subject; Chapter 7 -- Opening Up the Country: Christian Popular Culture, Generation Trouble, and Time; Chapter 8 -- Marriage comes from God: Negotiating Matrimony and Urban Sexuality (Part I); Chapter 9 -- The Danger of Sex: Negotiating Matrimony and Urban Sexuality (Part II); Chapter 10 -- Closure, Subplots, and Cliffhanger.

How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs, sermons, testimonies, and deliverance rituals to produce commentaries on what it means to be an inhabitant of Kinshasa.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

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