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In her 1986 book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author's experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou's quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou's work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama's rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

Since the sixteenth century, European and Euroamerican observers have puzzled over the identity, roles, and sexuality of the berdache, or what scholars now refer to as two-spirit people, in Native American societies in the Southeast. Formerly the domain of anthropological research, over the past generation gender theorists and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) scholars have produced fine studies that aim to demystify two spirits and decouple them from the racialized and heteronormative modes of thinking associated with settler colonialism in North America. As this activist scholarship continues to grow, historians of early America have at best played a marginal role in scholarly debates about two-spirit people. This essay represents a historical intervention in the current scholarly discussions about two-spirit people. Focusing particularly on the Cherokee in early America, the following analysis considers the methodological challenges associated with historical studies of two spirits, and presents insights into how historians might effectively craft more sophisticated and nuanced analyses of people variously referred to as hermaphrodites, sodomites, berdache, and two-spirit people in Native American societies of the Southeast.

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