Back to the Land of Roots. African American Tourism and the Cultural Heritage of the River Gambia

Bellagamba, Alice

doi:10.4000/etudesafricaines.18780

Cited by 19 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…J anis's visit was enabled by the flourishing of postcolonial heritage tourism that emerged in the United States following the publication of Alex Haley's book Roots in the 1970s and the production of a TV series with the same title. American travel agencies organized tours to a village in the Gambia that was allegedly the home of Kunta Kinte -Alex Haley's slave ancestor (Bellagamba, 2009). In 2004, J anis went on such a Roots tour to the Gambia along with about 30 African Americans who wanted to connect with their ancestry.…”

Section: In Search Of Historical Presencementioning

confidence: 99%

Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe

Dzenovska

2013

Anthropological Theory

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In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appropriation by Western scholars and travellers. I argue that Latvian identification with Europe's colonial past not only renders visible the continued salience of coloniality in European politics but also illuminates the mechanisms through which Europe attempts to renew its moral superiority in the global arena by relegating colonialism to a past that Europe claims to have overcome and that Latvians are required to overcome to become fully European. I argue that in order to understand how coloniality continues to inform political life in contemporary Europe it is necessary to move beyond analysis of national histories and deploy a relational approach which traces how contemporary political subjects are constituted in racialized and racializing fields of power relations. It is also necessary to analyse postsocialist Eastern Europe not only in relation to the socialist past but also the global present.

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Section: In Search Of Historical Presencementioning

confidence: 99%

Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe

Dzenovska

2013

Anthropological Theory

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“…In West Africa, local governments wishing to promote slave trade tourism supported UNESCO actions attempting to preserve African heritage. However these initiatives did not break the silence around the existence of slavery on African soil, the Muslim slave trade, and the African participation in the Atlantic slave trade (Holsey 2008;Bellagamba 2009;Noret 2011).…”

Section: Slave Trade Tourism In West Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once in the country, they visit Juffureh, which according to Haley was the village where Kinte was kidnapped. Since then, and especially during the 1990s, the country intensified the initiatives promoting slavery tourism, welcoming each year dozens of thousands of tourists (Bellagamba 2009 . N'Diaye used to describe the building as a slave warehouse, a kind of structure introduced to the island by the Portuguese in 1636.…”

Section: Slave Trade Tourism In West Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Welcome the Diaspora

Araújo

2011

ethno

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This article examines the emergence of the public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the Republic of Benin, by explaining how the heritagization of slavery was crucial for the development of a local tourism industry. The article shows that the rise of the public memory of the Atlantic slave trade in Benin is not an isolated venture and that similar initiatives were also developed in other West African countries. The article also discusses how the plural memories of slavery are articulated with the expectations of African American and Afro-Caribbean tourists, who are the main target of projects focusing on slavery cultural heritage and roots tourism. The article concludes that although slavery heritage tourism helped to place Benin among the international slavery tourist destinations, it also contributed to make visible the plural memories of slavery and to commodify African tangible and intangible heritage.

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“…To what extent do these industrially created identities motivated by commercial interests and fabricated by machines reflect the complexity of African pre-Atlantic histories? Direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry grew in parallel with the development of heritage tourism and the commodification of culture, but in the end many test takers and homecoming "Roots" tourists are disoriented and disappointed with realities on the ground in Africa (Bellagamba 2009;Bruner 1996;Ebron 1999;Hartman 2007;Holsey 2004Holsey , 2008Schramm 2009;Thiaw 2008;Tillet 2009). We worry, however, about political subjectivities imbedded in certain expectations concerning Africa and advocate for more thorough conversations among all people of African descent on past experiences, modern concerns, and future aspirations.…”

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confidence: 99%

Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies

Thiaw¹,

Mack²

2020

Current Anthropology

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This introductory article outlines the general orientations of the Wenner-Gren Foundation's 158th symposium held in Sintra, Portugal, in the autumn of 2018. It summarizes and reflects on the various communications and teases out how the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, knowledge production, and colonization shaped the modern world. It then contemplates a more equitable future through alternative problem-solving anthropology. On October 12-18, 2018, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research hosted its 158th symposium at Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal. The symposium gathered scholars from different disciplinary and geographical homes and was convened by Deborah L. Mack and Ibrahima Thiaw. It was designed to be an intellectual challenge to academic traditions within anthropology and offer models of what anthropology could become in order to have greater impact in policy, public culture, and action. It was intended to engage an uncomfortable and painful past whose buried memories continue to linger in the present. To do that, it was structured to accommodate a broad spectrum of cultural sensibilities and political subjectivities that lay bare the positionality of the researcher. The ultimate goal was to provoke, revisit, and redirect debates on Atlantic slavery and modernity across racial, cultural, class, and gender, as well as methodological and theoretical, boundaries for the twenty-first century and beyond. Following the statement of the goals and orientations of the symposium, all participants were asked to prepare papers that were circulated prior to the meeting. Paper presentations during the meeting were followed by thematic focus group discussions. The history of Atlantic slavery is tightly linked to that of European colonization of the rest of the world that went hand in hand with the production of Eurocentric knowledge. European global voyages, ca. 1400, were largely motivated by commerce and later colonization that meant economic and political control over new resources, territories, and their inhabitants. That colonial expansion was built on unequal relations legitimized by Eurocentric views of the world in general, elevating European over different others, particularly Black Africans and Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere. Physiological, biological, and phenotypical differences were translated into discriminating racial, ethnic, and national distinctions that were naturalized first on the basis of religion and physical appearance and later by way of anthropological and historical knowledge that, by the nineteenth century, became a powerful medium for representing and controlling non-European others (Cooper 2005; McClintock 1995; O'Brien 2010; Pratt 1992; Schlanger and Taylor 2012; Stoler 2002a). Eurocentric knowledge was strategically mobilized to intrude, search, analyze, dissect, and ultimately consume Black bodies according to European demands, needs, and standards (Curran 2011). Anthropological gaze born of modernity is a direct outcome of that colonial h...

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Back to the Land of Roots. African American Tourism and the Cultural Heritage of the River Gambia

Cited by 19 publications

References 29 publications

Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe

Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe

Welcome the Diaspora

Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies

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