Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage

Abstract

One of the most important issues in the anthropology of Africa of the late twentieth century has been the “invention of Africa.”1 V. Y. Mudimbe (1988) has demonstrated that, in addition to the existence of particular forms of native logics, colonial constructions of history, classifications of ethnicity, boundaries, and the imposition of European languages have informed the discourses through which Africans understand each other and themselves. This “invention” of Africanness has been revived by some black Americans in the United States, who, looking to Africa for ancestral roots, have reinvented themselves as both Africans (through descent) and U.S. Americans (through lived experience). It should be no surprise, therefore, that two of the most powerful ideological narratives of U.S. black nationalist imaginaries that took shape in the mid-1960s and continue to circulate in the present are the “slavery narrative” and the “African nobility-redemption” narrative.2 The slavery narrative (Martin Shaw and Clarke 1995) is based on notions of ancestral and therefore biological commonalities among black people. It narrates how Africans were torn from Africa, how they were enslaved because of racial oppression and brought to the New World. It also highlights how, despite the oppressive conditions under which they lived, enslaved Africans produced “diverse cultures” and maintained a fundamental connection to their African past. Through the symbolics of blood3 and diasporic displacement and suffering, these narratives signify a connection to Africa that produces notions of ancestry as being constituted through and from one black ancestor to another. It describes black Americans as surviving incarnations of pre-slavery African societies, thereby enabling a selfidentification of black Americans as not simply racialized, but fundamentally embedded in genealogies of heritage. The African nobility narrative, on the other hand, legitimates the centrality of slavery as the basis for African American connections to Africa, while also eliding it as secondary to the pride of black heritage. By highlighting the idea that African Americans are not merely victims of slavery but descendants of an