Healing Beyond Borders: Well-Being, Religion, and Migration in Postcolonial Netherlands

Have you ever wondered how people with a history of enslavement or colonialism heal from past trauma or navigate their life pursuits in a world with many borders?

Healing Beyond Borders explores healing among people of Afro-Surinamese (with a history of enslavement) and Ghanaian (with a history of colonisation) backgrounds in the Netherlands. Healing is a dynamic, multifaceted process shaped by physical, social, institutional, and spiritual borders. The book shows how people use healing as a means of crossing and transforming various borders innovatively and courageously.

Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, Healing Beyond Borders demonstrates that although many of the study participants identified as religious (mainly Pentecostal), religion constituted only one aspect of broader healing practices and approaches. Healing emerges not solely within religious borders but within contested spaces where identity, belonging, and survival are continually renegotiated. Often, people blend, cross, and draw strength from diverse practices, relationships, and lived experiences.

The book investigates the enduring legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and displacement, emphasising how these histories are carried, reimagined, or strategically silenced across communities, generations, and contexts. Healing Beyond Borders conceptualises healing within spaces and moments where people's pain, collective memory, systemic inequality, and colonial afterlives intersect, generating both opportunities for innovation and inclusion and points of questioning and exclusion. State, racial, religious, and communal borders function as obstacles but also as sites of creativity, struggle, and transformation. Healing Beyond Borders demonstrates that negotiating these borders can simultaneously dismantle and reproduce them, thereby revealing the complex, nonlinear realities of healing and diasporic identity. Through life stories and collective practices, the book challenges reductive conceptions of African and Black diasporic life in the Netherlands and Europe.

Healing Beyond Borders demonstrates that healing can be a profoundly political, relational, and transformative process shaped by communal support, religious belonging, marginality, internal critique, and the continuous navigation of the legacies of enslavement and colonialism. It provides an analytical framework for understanding how individuals and communities create meaning, care, and resistance in spaces characterised by inequality.

This book is intended for scholars and students in religious studies, anthropology, sociology, migration studies, and postcolonial studies, offering conceptually rigorous and politically urgent insights into the entanglements of healing, identity, and the enduring legacies of enslavement and colonialism.