Finding Home: Healing, Renewal, and Diasporic Consciousness

• In Event: Embracing Quilombismo: Echoes in the Africana World: Mothership Connections: Research Tour

Abstract

Like other invaded spaces in the western hemisphere, Brazil was built on the enslavement and extirpation of millions of indigenous and African peoples. Of the nearly 15 million Africans forcibly kidnapped to the Americas, more than half were relocated to Brazil between 1500 and 1870. For the over two billion present-day members of Black Diasporic populations, their history, heritage, and humanity is largely defined by fluxes and refluxes of disruption, displacement, and a protracted quest for return that has endured across long centuries. This paper is a reflective memoir that recounts the author’s recent excursion to Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) for an 11-day cultural study tour with a dozen colleagues with diverse backgrounds in education, science, medicine, and the arts. Channeling Abdias do Nascimento’s notion of quilombismo, the author explores the experience of the Bahian cultural study tour as cultural homegoing, transnational intellectual production, and the renewal of diasporic consciousness.

Author

• Lasana D. Kazembe, Indiana University - Indianapolis