The Awakening Giant

The role of local governments in attracting roots tourists is one of most important factors analyzed in the studies of diaspora tourism. Governments of several countries have actively sought to promote varied forms of roots tourism in order to attract members of their respective diasporas. In contrast, African American roots tourism in Brazil is marked by the almost complete inaction of the government, at both the state and federal levels. This type of tourism was initiated and continues to develop largely as the result of tourist demand, and with very little participation on the part of the state. This chapter analyzes the belated response of the state government of Bahia to African American tourism, examining how the inertia that dominated since the late 1970s was later replaced by a more proactive, although still inadequate, position, when the state tourism board, Bahiatursa, founded the Coordination of African Heritage Tourism to cater specifically to the African American roots tourism niche. The chapter also analyzes whether the left-leaning Workers’ Party, then in charge of the state government, challenged the longstanding discourse of baianidade (Bahianness) that has predominantly represented blackness (in tourism and other realms) through domesticated and stereotypical images.

We Bring Home the Roots

This chapter examines the gendered dimensions of travel in order to explain why women make up the majority of roots tourists in Brazil. It builds on the literature that seeks to deconstruct the implicitly masculinist abstract tourist subject. Analyzing why and how women travel is important in the project of challenging the supposed neutrality of “the tourist.” At the same time, although focusing on women travelers, the chapter does not confirm men as the norm that goes on unexamined. The chapter thus maps out the differences between women and men without further othering women. Even though the analysis looks more closely at women, it does so in order to examine gender more broadly, including the power relations between women and men, travel and tourism as fundamentally embodied and gendered practices, and the gendering of the diaspora though the gendering of space, place, and time.

Epilogue

The book concludes by reflecting on Brazil’s current political crisis, following the institutional coup d’état that ousted Dilma Rousseff, the country’s first female president. The epilogue discusses the deployment of an evolutionist language among the left to define the sudden turn of events as a “reversion” to a less advanced stage of the country’s development, and it argues that evolutionist explanations are unproductive, even when they seem appealing. Alternative ways to explain reality, that move us beyond hierarchical and Eurocentric logics, are more necessary than ever. The epilogue also points to new trends of black diaspora travel where transnational solidarity continues to be crucial, including that carried out by members of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black Gringos in Brazil?

This chapter examines how roots tourism has allowed for the construction of black racial solidarity between African Americans and Afro-Brazilians. Aware of their power as U.S. citizens, African Americans have actively “made use” of their identity, as both tourists and Americans, to support Afro-Brazilians. In addition to donating cash and goods and providing financial aid to Afro-Brazilian organizations, they have often requested black tourist guides and prioritized patronizing black-owned businesses so that their U.S. dollars are channeled to Afro-Brazilians. Afro-Brazilian actors, in general, have responded very positively to such practices of solidarity, even if they are also critical of, and ready to challenge, what they view as the tourists’ “Americanness.” Most importantly, Afro-Brazilian activists have also set the terms of engagement in these interactions and, rather than being mere beneficiaries, they have become important agents in these projects of transnational black solidarity, acting as co-producers in the processes of diaspora-making.

The Way We Were

This chapter examines the dominant African American roots tourist gaze on Brazil. Contrasting the discourse of the tourists, as expressed in ethnographic interviews, with the representations found in various textual and audiovisual sources, such as documentary films, books, newspaper articles, and tourism promotional materials, the chapter examines the three major intersecting tropes that inform and sustain this gaze: the trope of Bahia as a “closer Africa” and a place where African Americans can find their past; the trope of the “happy native,” or the perception that, because Afro-Brazilians supposedly inhabit the African American past, they are imagined to be essentially more culturally fulfilled than African Americans; and the trope of “black evolution,” which defines the “Africanness” of Afro-Brazilians as an earlier stage in the unidirectional path toward a modern form of blackness, one supposedly already reached by African Americans. In this view, Afro-Brazilians enjoy abundant African tradition, but have yet to achieve black modernity, and should therefore look up to African Americans for guidance.

That’s My Face

This chapter contextualizes African American roots tourism in Brazil both time-wise and space-wise. First, it locates the brief history of African American roots tourism within the longer trajectory of the meanings of Brazil for African Americans, spanning from the late nineteenth century—when, inspired by fantastical imaginings of Brazil as a “racial paradise,” groups of African Americans attempted to migrate there—to the present-day, when the country has become an important roots tourism destination. Second, the chapter compares representations of Brazil with those of other countries frequently visited by African American roots tourists, placing them within a wider system of meanings that the author defines as the “map of Africanness,” a map that is both spatial and temporal.

Introduction

The introduction explains the three central issues in light of which African American roots tourism in Brazil is examined: 1) The construction of diasporic identities through tourism, and how national and racial identities may contradict one another; 2) Roots tourism as a means for transnational black solidarity; 3) The geopolitics of the black diaspora since African Americans interact with Afro-Brazilians simultaneously as co-participants in the African diaspora and as citizens of the United States. The introduction also discusses the theoretical frameworks adopted in the book and the applicability of cultural studies and post-structuralism to study tourism discourses and practices, as well as the challenges of carrying out ethnographic research on tourists, subjects that are defined as being “on the move.”