Africanness Without Slavery: African American Tourism Representations of Brazil

• In Event: Representing Blackness, Africanness, and Slavery in/as Latin America

Abstract

Since the late 1970s African American artists and intellectuals have been traveling to Bahia, Brazil, attracted by the state’s conspicuous Afro-Brazilian culture. The 1980s witnessed the transformation of these informal trips into a structured tourism industry revolving around Bahia’s “preserved Africanisms.” Although Bahia’s “Africanness” is a central component of the public image of the state, it is dissociated from the history of slavery, the very reason why an African heritage exists there. Ironically the disregard for the history of slavery is a major point of convergence between, on one hand, a race-conscious African American roots tourist gaze and, on the other hand, the public image of racial harmony promoted by Bahia’s state agencies and tourism industry. Combining ethnographic research with a cultural studies analysis of media representations, this paper examines the meanings of Brazil vis-à-vis other destinations visited by African American roots tourists. The historical “roots” sought after in West African countries, which essentially revolve around the painful memory of slavery, contrasts drastically with the cultural “roots” found in Bahia, where the resilience of Candomblé, the rhythms of the blocos afro, and the flavor of the palm oil-based cuisine seem to confirm Bahia’s slogan as “terra da alegria” (land of joy).

Author

• Patricia Pinho, SUNY/University at Albany