African-American Roots Tourism in Brazil

Abstract

The novelty of African-American roots tourism to Brazil is that to some extent it defies the secondary position occupied by Brazil in the African diaspora, a context marked by the hegemony of U.S.-centric conceptions of blackness. At the same time, roots tourism entails three kinds of inequalities: the disparity between those who have access to travel and those who do not, the belief of many African-American tourists that they can exchange what they view as their “modernity” for the “traditions” of the local black communities with whom they interact during their travels, and the much greater access of African-Americans to the means by which Africa and the diaspora can be represented. Blacks located in the North and the South of the American continent have unequal access to global currents of power. Thus, at the same time that it offers the possibility of challenging traditional North-South flows of cultural exchange, African-American roots tourism confirms the existing hierarchy within the black Atlantic.