Localized neoliberalism, multiculturalism and global religion: exploring the agency of migrants and city boosters

Abstract

This paper examines the discourse on citizenship and cultural values in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, a city that has received many immigrants. The author examines how multiculturalism was endorsed by political and economic city leaders in their initial efforts to reinvent their city within an agenda of neoliberal restructuring, but rejected generally by the very migrants deemed to embody cultural difference. The migrants in the case study – from a wide array of countries – countered the push towards cultural politics with public non-ethnic identification with a global religion, Christianity, Buddhism or Islam. I suggest that in certain localities the universalistic claims of global religions have facilitated the local and transnational incorporation of migrants in ways that reject aspects of both multiculturalism and neoliberalism.