Akan-speaking Methodists in London make sense of their diasporic experience by claiming ‘virtuous’ citizenship. Regardless of their legal and formal status, they feel themselves to be citizens of Britain as Methodists, workers and law-abiding subjects. Active membership in the British Methodist church, conceived as an English transnational polity extending to Ghana, allows for this alternative construction, rooted in Methodist Christian ideology of universal and selfless love, and the Akan concept of tema ‐ empathy for the pain of others, expressed in moral and material obligations to humanity at large, and family or fellowship members. Encapsulation in ethnically exclusive fellowships has become, however, highly problematic for the British Methodist Church whose internal conversation mirrors wider debates in Britain on multiculturalism and immigrant citizenship. Ghanaians themselves are increasingly aware of this critique, but for them ethnic fellowships do not imply exclusion or exclusiveness: they are the loci where people’s agency is experienced, and where they gain recognition and distinction.

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Scholarship on the African diaspora has documented the legal hurdles African migrants face in acquiring residence and begun to record the religious efflorescence of African Independent churches. Missing, however, is attention to the complex moral assumptions informing African diasporic sociality and claims to citizenship, whether through churches or voluntary associations. The present volume fills this hiatus by theorising the moral economy of citizenship claims and transnational giving. Its contributors explore the underlying ethical assumptions, ideas and practices of African migrants implied by their calls for recognition and the right to work and live in the diaspora, whether or not they possess the required legal documents, and despite being different racially and culturally. We interrogate both the tendency of migrants to encapsulate themselves in religious or home town associations with compatriots or coreligionists, and their expansive horizons and moves towards ‘permeable’ ethnicity, ‘cosmopolitan’ networking and multiculturalism, as they create, imagine and construct the ‘African diaspora’.

For Akan-speaking Ghanaians in London, public events and rites of passage are constitutive of their diasporic subjectivity and sociality, re-establishing and reinforcing material and symbolic connections within the diaspora and the home country. Their participation reasserts their ontological presence in the world and renders them visible and distinct in the eyes of fellow migrants, thus denying their social marginality. This ontological presence is produced through a uniquely Akan aesthetic, realised in linguistic terms, through proverbs, mottoes and wise sayings; in material terms, through sartorial ostentation and the use and display of elaborate dresses and other material objects; in taste, through the consumption of ethnic food; and in visual terms, through the use of videos and photographs. By drawing on a range of ethnographic examples from London and Ghana, this paper shows the complex overlap between the discursive and the material in the formation of Akan migrants' aestheticised subjectivity as they reassert their place in the London diaspora.