Roots Tourism Research Articles

African homecoming: Pan-African ideology and contested heritage

African Americans and others in the African diaspora have increasingly come home to Africa to visit the sites at which their ancestors were enslaved and shipped. In this nuanced analysis of homecoming, Katharina Schramm analyzes how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced among African hosts and Diasporan returnees and at the same time contested in practice. She examines the varying interpretations and appropriations of significant sites (e.g. the slave forts), events (e.g. Emancipation Day) and discourses (e.g. repatriation) in Ghana to highlight these dynamics. From this, she develops her notions of diaspora, home, homecoming, memory and identity that reflect the complexity and multiple reverberations of these cultural encounters beyond the sphere of roots tourism.

Negotiating Identity: Experiences of "Visiting Home" Among Chinese Americans

"Roots tourism" is loosely defined as a type of tourism in which ethnic minorities visit their ancestral lands to discover ethnic roots and culture. Despite the recent popularity of this type of tourism, many gaps remain in the study of roots tourism, particularly about its influence on the tourists' identity. This exploratory study investigates the ways in which second and subsequent generations of Chinese Americans discuss their identity and feelings of belonging after visiting China. Face-to-face, in-depth interviews with Chinese Americans revealed that, contrary to the idea that roots tourism experiences provide individuals with strong feelings of belonging to one's ancestral land, interviewees did not return from their visit with a feeling of connection to China. Rather, they reported a need to negotiate and redefine who they were and where they belonged. This study highlights how physical markers of Chinese identity added complexity to the negotiation of one's identity. Because the interviewees "looked" Chinese, in a variety of situations they were automatically assumed to be Chinese while their American identity was ignored. Although Chinese Americans occasionally took advantage of such ascribed identity as Chinese, they often felt frustration, anger, and ambiguity about how they defined themselves and how others defined them. As a result of visiting China, although Chinese American tourists developed a certain sense of affinity to their ancestral land, they also affirmed that their true home was in the US. This study suggests a complexity and limitation to fostering a sense of belonging to their ancestral land through roots tourism.

“Find their Level”. African American Roots Tourism in Sierra Leone and Ghana

In many "developing" and post-conflict African nations, cultural tourism has been touted as a vital source of foreign exchange revenue for jumpstarting national devel­opment. This trend has led to a scramble in Africa by African state officials seeking to "package" their nations in order to attract the patronage of Diasporan "returnees"— descendants of the Middle Passage who travel to Africa in search of cultural and historical "roots". This situation is further complicated by the fact that the planning and execution of national "packaging" frequently bypasses the ordinary citizen. Thus the official agenda of these nation states is sometimes at odds with the aspirations of local citizens and pan-African sojourners. Moreover, this trend has contributed to considerable conceptual slippage and, consequently, vociferous debates over the meaning of and criteria for asserting Africanness. In other instances, these conjunc­tures have transformed and enhanced received notions of African identity. An ethno­graphic comparison of a developing nation (Ghana) and a post-conflict nation (Sierra Leone) can both deepen and complicate our understandings of this emerging pan-African phenomenon and its attendant possibilities and limitations. We consider how these complimentary and conflicting interests, beliefs, and practices converge to shape novel modes of pilgrimage, nationhood, transnational dialogue, and globalization.

The Emotional Function of the Migrant's “Birthplace” in Transnational Belonging: Thomas Mellon (1813–1908) and Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)

Two migrant autobiographies (Mellon and Carnegie) are selected for comparison of their detailed descriptions of return to the birthplace. It is of added interest that both birthplaces are now public museums. The narratives are analysed in terms of the sevenfold typology of Booker (2004). Consideration is then given to a theory about the significance of the migrant's birthplace advanced in a third migrant narrative by Edna O'Brien. Finally, it is suggested that return to the birthplace has a therapeutic function, especially in the case of those like Mellon and Carnegie whose experience of emigration as children was traumatic. Their returns are found to complete their migration narratives, in a circular rather than linear way, with a kind of “rebirth” after which they experience a new, harmonious sense of transnational belonging. “Roots tourists” who visit the birthplace of an emigrant ancestor or, as a surrogate, an emigrant birthplace museum, may experience similar emotion and, as a result, a similar enhanced and liberating sense of transnational belonging.

African-American Roots Tourism in Brazil

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.

Brazil’s Two Africas, or which Africa to find in what Brazil?

The article investigates the idea of Africa as central to theimagining of the Brazilian nation. It agues that the popular beliefsand the black movement differ significantly in their views ofBrazil as well as the images of Africa they each use to explain theplace of black people in the New World. Thereby the meaning ofboth Brazil and Africa are a matter of conflict depending onwhether Brazil is seen to be a racial democracy or fraught withstructural racism, and whether Africa is a place of famine, civilwar and deceases having lost its past glory or in fact a gloriousplace of proud kings and queen. Each picture of Africa and Brazilconnotes different positions for black Brazilians. The picture isfurther complicated by the Roots Tourism from North Americarecombining the elements from each to create a place of origin, anAfrica in Brazil.

Fighting the slave trade: West African strategies

Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Edited by Sylviane Diouf Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxvii, 242. $65.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Sylviane Diouf, accomplished Atlantic and African historian, has undertaken a labor both of passion and of erudition in editing Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. In her introduction to this edited collection, she struggles to bring together an uneven set of conference papers with some success. In providing overarching themes for the strategies used by West Africans against the Atlantic slave trade, she reaches beyond (p. x) in an attempt to understand how Africans acted to preserve self, family, and society. She challenges prevailing opinion that seeks to portray Africans as the other in the slave trade, pointing out that Europeans, after all, had deported their own as well, and making reasonable comparisons between the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust (pp. x-xi). Yet she does not seek to be an apologist for Africans, does not shy away from either the difficult question of betrayal of Africans by Africans (pp. xiii-xiv) or the African/African-American divide evident to those who have studied roots tourism in Ghana and elsewhere (p. xvi). In twelve chapters and an epilogue, Diouf has collected a far wider and sometimes more incisive set of analyses of West Africans' resistance to the depredations of the Atlantic slave trade than published previously. Despite the title, most of the papers do not describe armed struggle at all, but instead adopt approaches taken by James Scott and others in understanding resistance to colonialism in terms of less obvious strategies avoidance, self-interest, foot-dragging, and even exodus. The Africans in Fighting the Slave Trade flee to defensible or less penetrable environments such as forests and caves, they trade their own slaves and newly won captives to Europeans in exchange for their relatives, they change their cultivation habits, undertake informal boycotts, and give misinformation to raiders. They also engage in both planned and organic social transformations as a defensive measure. West Africans exposed to slave raiding alter their housing construction, village architecture, field arrangement, cultivation methods, settlement size, religion and rituals, central political institutions, and diplomatic arrangements. Many do fight the trade actively: several contributors point to evidence of the growth and increasing sophistication of armies, revolts by slaves within West African states, and revolts on board ships as evidence of a previously understated level, as well as range, of struggle against the transatlantic slave trade within and on the coast of West Africa. Equally gripping although less celebrated is evidence that West Africans chose to become slavers in an attempt to avoid becoming slaves. This is put forward most compellingly by Walter Hawthorne, who elaborates the controversial gun-slave cycle proposed by Joe Inikori and Paul Lovejoy in the early 1980s by suggesting that acephalous societies in Guinea-Bissau traded slaves for iron used in making melee weapons. Similar evidence of escapees and refugees becoming slavers is presented by Elisee Soumonni for Benin and in the oft-noted case of Masina, here simply but authoritatively set out by Martin Klein. Diouf herself notes counter-examples in which slave traders journeying to the coast were seized and themselves enslaved. This evidence, collected in a single volume, highlights the confusing and complex situation in West Africa during the slave trade, and hints at the need for further research. In developing this collection, Diouf has recreated the discourse on the strategies of West Africans in the uncertain times of the Atlantic slave trade in a new, more nuanced and expansive shape. Alas, the chapters themselves are somewhat uneven, as is often the case with such collections developed from conference papers. …

Home-Coming and Goings

Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return examines various types of return migration, including the return of war refugees, political exiles, and diasporics to their real or imagined homelands, as well as “roots tourism” and forms of long-distance nationalism that are collectively, if not precisely, referred to as “homecomings.” According to one of the editors, Anders Stefansson, return movements across time and space have been ignored in migration studies and social anthropology research because “going home” is perceived as an “antiprogressive, illogical, and illusory” practice that is “structurally invisible” (5). Stefansson adds that the analytical neglect of return migration is due to the fact that the conceptual and practical issues of homecoming have fallen at the margins of the “grand narratives” of migration research (i.e., assimilation, multiculturalism/diaspora, and transnationalism/globalization) and that return migrations are seen by some migration scholars as unproblematic and natural reinsertions into the “home” country. The other editor, Fran Markowitz, contends that Homecomings aims to move beyond the restrictive binaries of migration research that represent movements as emigration versus immigration, and/or as places of departure versus destinations, to explore the “messy points of convergence” that are created when individual and cultural beliefs and memories lead to movements toward places people consider their homelands. The volume not only aims to fill the gap in migration research but seeks to demonstrate that the “blessings of homecomings” are well worth the struggle and difficulties encountered by diasporics, political exiles, and war refugees who “go home.”

Genealogical Identities

Ideas of belonging, cultural identity, and social relations based on ancestral connection, blood, and primordial kinship, have a contradictory presence in cultural theory and public culture. The search for alternatives to fixed, essentialist, and exclusive ways of imagining culture and belonging has been central to recent cultural theory and cultural geography. This has involved much attention to cultural routes, mobility, and hybridity and a critique of cultural roots, fixity, and purity in response to increasing transnational flows, the experience of displaced people, racism, and ethnic fundamentalism. Yet discourses of indigeneity and new migration patterns, as well as cultural globalisation more widely, have also prompted the growth in genealogy amongst ‘settler’ groups in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States who search for European, and often specifically Irish, roots. In this paper I explore the relationships between ideas of nation, ancestry, and diaspora. I focus on what happens when questions of nationality, ethnicity, and identity meet in the practice of ancestral research in Ireland, and begin to track the spatially differentiated cultural politics of genealogy. As the language of genealogy travels with Irish roots tourists and through electronic networks, the implications of genealogical practices and identifications can mutate so that what may be a politically regressive turn to ethnic purity and racial discourse in one context can, in another, productively unsettle older exclusive versions of belonging. For both individual and collective identities, genealogical projects can have unsettling results.