Counterpublic Collisions: African American Travel, Diasporic Engagement, and The Impact of Transient Discourses On Political Ideology Formation

Counterpublic Collisions:
Afri can Am eri can Trav el , Di asp ori c En g ag em en t ,
an d t h e Im p act of Tran si en t Di scou rses on
Pol i t i cal Id eol og y Form at i on
by
Kyle Hotchkiss Carone
A Senior Thesis presented to the Department of Politics in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
April 3, 2009
For my grandmother, Mary Hotchkiss,
and my mother, Gail Carone.
ii 
Acknowledgements
While there are countless professors at Princeton University who have exposed me to the
nuances of race relations in the United States – Douglas Massey, Eddie Glaude, Thomas
Espenshade, Martin Gilens, and Cornel West to name a few – it has been my time spent
studying under Melissa Harris-Lacewell that has so drastically shifted the ways in which I
understand how politics plays out in the lives of everyday Americans. In her courses on
topics ranging from “Black Women’s Political Activism” to “Environmental Justice” to
“Disaster, Race, and American Politics,” Professor Harris-Lacewell has informed my
study of political science by exposing the contentious matters of race that exist in every
dimension of public and private spheres. I am eternally grateful for her openness to my
search for political thought in the seemingly jejune acts of tourism, and it has been a
privilege and honor to write this thesis on the politics of travel with her careful guidance.
I must also express my gratitude to the authors whose works cross a multitude of
disciplines but have each contributed to my understanding of the forces that shape African
American life. From the first ethnography I ever read, Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of
Respect, to the dense philosophical writing of Kwame Anthony Appiah in
Cosmopolitanism, each author cited in this thesis has made me proud to engage in a
tradition of intense scholarly inquiry that produces distinct and new ways of
understanding the political realm.
For agreeing to talk me through the two most difficult parts of the writing process I am
indebted to a number of extremely intelligent individuals: Professors Simon Gikandi and
Lawrie Balfour, who helped me refine my topic when it barely made any sense, and my
friends Danny Shea, Joey Mayer, and Lily Cowles who edited my final drafts.
On a personal level, I owe my deepest thanks to my parents for encouraging me to write

the rules of my own education and to my sister for reminding me throughout my
childhood that someday, when I was older, I’d find a place that rewarded my curiosity.
Today, as I prepare to graduate from Princeton, I can testify to the prescience of my
family’s advice.
Finally, I must thank my grandmother, who taught me Martin Luther King’s eternal
lesson, “We cannot walk alone,” by pridefully marching along my side for twenty-one
years.
iii 
Contents
Acknowledgements iii.
Abstract v.
Chapter O ne 1
The Traveling Counterpublic
Chapter Two 40
Capoeira, Candomblé, and Carnaval: Emancipated and Problematized Spaces

in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Chapter Three 86
Mother Homeland?
Rage, Redemption, Celebration and Double Alienation in Ghana
Chapter Four 131
Tourism and Political Ideology Formation:

Concluding Thoughts on the Relevance of Black Travel as a Counterpublic Space
Bibliography 147
Back Matter 163
iv 
Abstract
This paper considers the association between African American travel and political
ideology formation as a means of testing Dawson and Harris-Lacewell’s framework for
understanding counterpublic spaces. In an attempt to expand those authors’ understanding
of counterpublic spaces, this paper assesses the black discourses that result from the
foreign and fleeting interactions that accompany African American travel abroad. Through
two case studies that analyze black travel in Brazil and Ghana, I outline how
“counterpublic collisions” between African American travelers and blackness abroad may
challenge political ideologies in unique ways.
First, I examine black travel narratives concerning Brazil and suggest that African
Americans adopt unique strategies of Afro-Brazilian resistance through their engagement
with Capoeira, Candomblé, and Carnaval. These resistance strategies appear to strengthen
African Americans’ Nationalist beliefs in the deployment of culture as a political weapon
and evidence the transformative nature of transnational, diasporic engagement.
Next, I assess the reactions of African Americans to their completion of the “back to
Africa” narrative. I suggest that in heritage sites such as Elmina and Cape Coast slave
castles, African Americans write hidden transcripts of rage, redemption, and Nationalism. I
contend that these transcripts are evidence that travel serves as a shocking event capable
of causing the traveler to undergo an ideological shift.
Through evidence found in primary and secondary travel narratives, I conclude that
African Americans undergo significant political ideology complications during their time
abroad. These complications suggest that counterpublic spaces exist in previously
unacknowledged spaces, and result in liberatory discourses that challenge dominant sphere
oppression. The ideological transformations that travelers undergo prove the unique
nature of travel as a type of politics in motion.
v 
Chapter One
The Traveling Counterpublic

From the very beginning of Negro history in our land, Negroes have asserted their right to
freedom of movement…From the days of chattel slavery until today, the concept of travel has
been inseparably linked in the minds of our people with the concept of freedom.
– Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (1958)
Perhaps just over there some place, in another country, in another life-style, in another social
class, perhaps, there is genuine society.
– Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (1976)
No discourse is ever a monologue.
– Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse (1985)
Introduction
he history of blacks in America is a history built upon the movement of
T black bodies. The Middle Passage, Jim Crow legislation, the Great
Migration, Garvey-ism, and many other crucial dimensions of African American history are
related to the travels of blacks to, from, and within America. African American
anthropologist Renata Harden suggests, “African American identity is best understood as
identities in motion, adapting and changing in different environments and within various
1 
Chapter One: The Traveling Counterpublic
contexts.”1 This motion and these different environments are carefully documented in
primary sources such as diaries, travelogues, and slave narratives, and are also fictionalized
in the works of some of the African American communities’ most prolific novelists. Yet
despite the importance of travel to the black experience in America, little has been written
by social scientists on the topic that Zora Neale Hurston declared “the soul of
civilization.”2
The importance of travel to all who embark upon it, regardless of race, suggests
that an academic discourse should exist centered on travel as a site of identity and
ideology formation or reconsideration. What mostly exists in the academic community,
however, is a conversation largely centered on travel as it relates to issues of modernity,
societal structure, and global consumption. While these concepts are certainly integral to
the study of African American movement, they do not provide an ample and unique
framework for grappling with the political and identity issues that arise during travel that
are particular to black people. In this paper I hope to extend the analysis of black travel
beyond these limitations in order to understand how foreign spaces are uniquely capable of
fostering discourses of black resistance and liberation.
In Barbershops, Bibles, BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, political
scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell argues, “If we are to understand the genesis and
development of political thought among African Americans [it is essential to] listen in on
                                                        
1
Renata Harden, “Identities in Motion: An Autoethnography of an African American Woman's Journey to
Burkina Faso, Benin, and Ghana” (OhioLINK / Bowling Green State University, 2007),
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num.
2
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, The American Negro, His History and Literature (New York:
Arno Press, 1969), 148.
2 
their every day talk.”3 In this paper, I will argue that black travel abroad – though neither
ordinary nor everyday – is capable of spurring an internal political grappling of its own, a
type of displaced self-reflection that significantly complements the experiences Harris-
Lacewell argues shape black ideology. Using Harris-Lacewell’s framework for
understanding black identity formation through an engagement with everyday black
conversation, I have conducted dozens of interviews with black travelers who have
journeyed to two popular black destinations: Ghana and Brazil. In these destinations,
black travelers discover societies that foster black communities both similar and dissimilar
to their own communities at home, resulting in both unique reactions to and important
interactions with foreign blackness through a diasporic counterpublic engagement.
The travelers I interviewed universally and vividly described the moment that they
realized they were, for the first time in their lives, positioned in a society wherein they
existed as members of a majority black culture. In this paper I will argue that the
repositioning that occurs during this form of diasporic black travel fosters the emergence
of transient black counterpublic spaces that are uniquely contested, transnational, and
crucial to the production of what James Scott calls “hidden transcripts,”4 or counter-
hegemonic discourses that take place outside the surveillance of dominant spheres.
It is my intention in this paper to address the ways in which this certain form of
travel – that which removes African Americans from U.S. society and places them in
                                                        
3
Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 405.
4
James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990).
3 
foreign black communities – fosters the rapid and radical development of lasting political
opinions and conceptions of identity. In this paper I will assert that travel abroad, through
a process reminiscent of the one that accompanies everyday conversation in the United
States, creates a unique arena for the careful construction of hidden transcripts and
resistant discourses. Scott claims that in order for black resistance or insurgence to
succeed, “The subordinate group must carve out for itself social spaces insulated from
control and surveillance from above. If we are to understand the process by which
resistance is developed and codified, the analysis of the creation of these offstage social
spaces becomes a vital task.”5 In heeding Scott’s call, I have taken up the task of assessing
how African Americans use travel to diaspora locations in order to “carve out…in-
between spaces” wherein they may contend with difficult questions of political ideology
and identity in a “terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal –
that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation,
in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”6
I assert that African American travel to interstices of culture and ethnicity spurs an
intense inquiry into controversial conceptions of Pan-Africanism, global identity, Cultural
Nationalism, double-consciousness, and a multitude of other ideologies that African
Americans may not so willingly contend with when at home. It is in this struggle for
selfhood that African American travel abroad becomes a significant contributor to black
political ideology and notions of nationhood.
                                                        
5
Ibid., 118.
6
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.
4 
Homi Bhabha, a theorist on postcolonialism, writes, “Political empowerment and
the enlargement of the multiculturalist cause come from posing questions of solidarity and
community from the interstitial perspective.”7 This interstitial perspective is one that
comes readily with black travel abroad, and is impacted by both destination and
experience. Though no two tourist sites are alike, this paper will attempt to identify
diverse diaspora spaces that foster an awareness of a complicated identity paradigm and a
unique black international counterpublic. While some destinations may confuse or hinder
pan-African sentiment, others may strengthen it. While some destinations may trouble
black travelers and produce anxieties, other destinations have the exact opposite effect,
leading black travelers to return to these places, sometimes even referring to them as
“second homes” – spaces where they perhaps feel more comfortable than they do in
America. Through a literary review and an analysis of travel narratives, these sentiments
can be understood as products of diasporic engagement and counterpublic ideology
formation.
In this thesis, I will argue that for African Americans – a minority group existing in
a society where their culture is subjugated by a white hegemonic power – foreign travel to
black destinations abroad and their subsequent engagement with the black counterpublic
that exists there can be truly transformative. Inherent to each black tourist destination
exist unique tensions that often make foreign travel difficult for African Americans to
grapple with, yet these tensions also provide the motivation for African Americans to
                                                        
7
Ibid., 4.
5 
contend with deep questions of political ideology in the setting of a unique, international
black sphere.
Tours “home” to Africa often do not provide the sort of black paradise that many
travelers imagine, yet this disappointment is compelling in its ability to complicate pan-
African sentiment and disrupt a connection between African Americans and the people of
their regarded homeland. Vacation and leisure in a black, Third World context often leaves
African Americans uncomfortable with the dominance of their “Americanness” and their
sudden participation in a hegemonic discourse that plays out in front of their black
brothers and sisters in the diaspora. Nonetheless, these leisure experiences often create
powerful transcripts as African Americans attempt to contextualize their own failures and
successes in relation to those in global black communities. In Brazil, interactions with
Afro-Brazilians who are generationally equidistant from Africa may lead to black travelers’
examinations of fate, brotherhood, and pan-African identity. At the same time, the racial
paradise that black travelers expect to find is often complicated by direct confrontations
with problematizing manifestations of inequality. Tensions such as these lay at the heart
of this paper’s inquiry into the power of black tourism abroad and its potential to alter
political identity in spaces outside the surveillance of the dominant white American sphere.
Would travelling abroad make it any easier for Du Bois to answer his ultimate
question, “Am I an American or am I a Negro?”8 Would Malcolm X, who claimed that to
                                                        
8
William Edward Burghardt DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (W. W. Norton, 1999).
6 
become an American, “You’ve got to enjoy the fruits of Americanism,”9 accept African
American hegemony over Third World blacks abroad as an example of such fruits? In
what ways does traveling abroad force black Americans to recognize their “Americanness”
at the precise moment when they are attempting to shed that part of their identity? These
are the types of questions I seek to address through an analysis of black travelers’
reactions to the sites and sounds of two distinctly black locations: Brazil and Ghana.
Cultural critic Kobena Mercer states, “Identity only becomes an issue when it is in
crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the
experience of doubt and uncertainty.”10 This paper will turn to travel as a source of black
identity crises and assess, through an analysis of both contemporary, unpublished travel
narratives and historic, published travelogues, the ability of black Americans to emerge
from their travels both politically and socially challenged by foreign black culture and
politics. These discourses that occur abroad, I will argue, are grounded in the hidden
transcripts that emerge from black travelers’ engagement with black counterpublics
abroad.
Methods
I began my research by reaching out to African Americans who had recently
traveled to Brazil and Ghana. Through travel agent contacts across the United States,
                                                        
9
Malcolm X, “Brotherhood Among Ourselves” (Speech presented at the Afro-American Broadcasting
Conference, Detroit, Michigan, February 14, 1965).
10
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,
1994), 259.
7 
classified listings, Internet research, and other sources, I culled a group of travelers willing
to discuss their experiences interacting with black communities abroad. In addition to
consulting with interview subjects, I engaged in on-sight, participatory observation in
Brazil – conversing with fellow travelers as they experienced tourism sites in Rio de
Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia first-hand. In addition to the sources I conversed with
directly, I also cite the public postings of African American bloggers and the published
narratives of African American authors who have traveled to Brazil and Africa. These
written, reflective travelogues are called on to confirm some of the trends that myself and
other heritage tourism researchers identify in personal interviews.
In the psychological study, “Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging,”
researchers Guadagno, Okdie, and Eno suggest that bloggers are typically people “high in
openness to new experience.”11 The blogs I consult seem to echo those findings and often
provide more honest and open reflections than those elicited through personal interviews.
The blog postings and published narratives of African American travelers thus serve as an
excellent source for understanding reactions to sites of identity crisis that subjects may
feel less compelled to tell through telephone or in-person interviews, but are compelled to
share in the public domain, nonetheless.
The narratives provided by black travelers, travel agents, and tour guides reflect
the diverse reactions and opinions that result from diaspora travel; combined, however,
                                                        
11
Rosanna E. Guadagno, Bradley M. Okdie, and Cassie A. Eno, “Who blogs? Personality predictors of
blogging,” Computers in Human Behavior 24, no. 5 (September 2008): 1993-2004,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDC-4R5G84W-
1/2/78ac3de1c108fb803387ba9abea7c7ba.
8 
their stories provide solid evidence of the radical and liberatory influence that time spent
abroad can have on all black travelers. The probes I chose to use during my interviews
with recent travelers were particularly open-ended. In order to assess whether their travel
moved them politically, I allowed my subjects to reflect on their experiences without
urging them to focus on how their interactions may have produced political implications.
With a small set of politically innocuous questions, I engaged with interview subjects
through approximately one-hour long conversations on the motivations for travel to global
black locations, the type of travel (group or individual) that they took part in, their
positive and negative reactions to experiences abroad, and the ways in which they believe
their travel left a lasting impression on their self identity.
To further evidence the desire for African Americans to find a sense of political self
when traveling abroad, I conducted a limited review of tourism industry literature and
market research. The ways in which tour group operators prime their participants for a
revelatory political and cultural experience is crucial to understanding the dynamics that
unfold when African Americans arrive at their destinations.
The marketing of tourism experiences is not limited to travel agents and tour
operators, however, as actors such as state tourism boards and public planners are equally
responsible for the creation of black counterpublic spaces. Harris-Lacewell’s assessment of
Black Entertainment Television as a source of counterpublic discourse is useful in framing
the black cultural sites that African Americans visit as discursive spaces relevant of
analysis. Tourism itineraries and heritage sites, much like the black media that Harris-
9 
Lacewell discusses, are often controlled by “ideological elites” who may be pushing their
own agenda that is inconsistent with travelers’ expectations and desires.12
In my analysis of tourist patterns, I will assert that in addition to the images, texts,
and displays that exist in cultural arenas such as public squares and heritage sites, less
overtly political spaces such as grounds of religious worship and tourist-oriented markets
are equally important in shaping the discourses of black diasporic travel. I argue that these
interactions with foreign black culture contribute to the conversations that black travelers
engage in with each other, with the black foreigners they encounter, and with themselves.
Overview
I will begin this paper by examining the ways in which contemporary African
American travel can be understood in the context of academic literature surrounding
notions of public spheres and counterpublic discourses. The situation of African American
travel into the body of literature surrounding counterpublics will be bolstered by drawing
links between theories of public spheres, the study of double consciousness in Paul
Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”, and theories relating to tourism, identity, and citizenship.
Next, I will review depictions of African American travel in published travelogues
in order to assert the historical importance of the movement of black bodies in forming
African American identity. The ways in which critics have understood these narratives in
the past will provide a useful point of departure from which to begin exploring the
                                                        
12
Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET, chap. 6, "Speaking to, Speaking for, Speaking with: Black
Ideological Elites".
10 
unpublished narratives produced by a traveling black counterpublic. I will then inject the
tales from my own descriptive research into this discourse in order to lend support to my
argument that contemporary black travels to diaspora locations should be understood as
definitive sites of counterpublic discourse.
These unique narratives will drive the thesis of this paper as I attempt to
demonstrate how travel is a unique enabler of African American entrance into an interstitial
space that allows, or even forces, black travelers to contend with their global identity and
return from their travels with distinct, though perhaps complicated, conceptions of self.
These identity crises are the result of problematic economic, cultural, and political
interactions that have been historically documented in descriptions of black travel
throughout the twentieth century and contemporarily verified through the narratives I
drew out of both primary research subjects and secondary narrative sources. Such
problematic interactions are complemented, however, by empowering spaces of black
resistance and pride that lend themselves to the strengthening of certain ideologies
surrounding self-determination, Black Feminism, and Cultural Nationalism.
The intention of this paper is not to reduce the effect of journeys abroad on African
American travelers to the formation of one universal ideology, but instead to describe the
ways in which temporary travel to diverse locations in the black diaspora cause what I
label counterpublic collisions, or the exchange of ideas and complication of world views
that results when a traveling, African American sphere confronts a foreign, black
counterpublic. These interactions of black spheres inspire self-reflection and a wrestling
with varying ideological perspectives among African American travelers as they grapple
11 
with diverse and foreign manifestations of blackness and create hidden, travel transcripts
that reflect opposition to dominant American political discourse.
Finally, this thesis takes on a form intended to expand the traditions of political
science through its inclusion of theories that come from a multitude of vantage points.
Discourses surrounding African American Studies, tourism, critical race theory, literature,
postcolonialism, philosophy, anthropology, queer theory, film, culture, sociology, identity,
performance, and geography will be woven together with unique travel and tourism
narratives to make a distinct argument for the importance of movement and cross-cultural
interaction in the construction of African Americans’ political identities.
The Black Counterpublic
In Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Ideologies, political
scientist Michael Dawson defines the black counterpublic as a semi-autonomous space in
which African Americans engage with other African Americans in ways that produce
distinct and valuable political thoughts and ideologies.13 Such a space is necessary,
Dawson argues, in order for African Americans to engage politically outside of a restrictive
bourgeois public sphere that German philosopher Jürgen Habermas posits is the site of
society’s collective political ideology formation. Habermas asserts that the discursive
relations within the bourgeois public sphere lead to the debate and discussion of topics
that concern the state. Dawson’s particular focus on the ways in which Habermas’
                                                        
13
Michael C Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 23-29.
12 
conception of the public sphere ignores the worldviews of African Americans follows
earlier critiques put forth by postmodern and feminist voices. These works are influential
to Dawson’s articulation of what constitutes a responsive black counterpublic.
The critics of Habermas’ locus classicus on a singular public sphere point to the
underlying exclusivity of such a space in order to argue for the necessity in recognizing
subaltern discourses.14 Once these discourses are recognized, critics argue, an alternate
history that is inclusive of oppositional counterpublics becomes a possibility. Habermas’
implicit assumption in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – that the
discourse of the public sphere is representative of the whole of society15 – serves to
marginalize the opinions of those who are denied access to the “physical or mediated
spaces where people can gather and share information, debate opinions, and tease out their
political interests and social needs with other participants.”16
In “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy,” critical theorist Nancy Fraser illustrates the marginalization of non-
elite human experiences through both her own analysis of Habermas’ shortcomings, as
well as the analyses of fellow postmodern scholars. Fraser places herself in a school of
critical theory that argues that the existence of a public sphere is constituted by exclusion
and faults Habermas for failing to recognize the importance of the oppositional
                                                        
14
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J Calhoun, Studies in contemporary German
social thought (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), 109-142.
15
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, Studies in contemporary German social thought (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press).
16
C. R. Squires, “Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public
spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 448.
13 
counterpublics that complicate his narrow, idealized assessment of the liberal public
sphere. Fraser argues that Habermas’ understanding of the public sphere is reflective of the
ways in which the norms espoused in bourgeois discourse become "hegemonic, sometimes
imposed on, sometimes embraced by, broader segments of society.”17 Fraser and other
critics claim that in failing to recognize the plurality of human experience in these broader
segments of society, Habermas accepts an incomplete history that validates the bourgeois
discourse as a universal one.
Dawson and Harris-Lacewell both employ Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas
as a point of departure in attempting to understand the unique relationship between
African Americans and the white dominant sphere. Their attempts to include black
discursive spaces in America’s greater political discourse are motivated by a shared
understanding of the bourgeois public sphere as a space that universalizes the opinions of
the privileged and limits societal discourse to the opinions of a white, monolithic
community, supported by America’s racial order. Both authors seek not only to map out
the development of a black counterpublic in the United States, but also to assess the
vivacity of the contemporary black counterpublic and to consider whether spaces still exist
that can be identified as contestatory sites in which shared ideologies are negotiated.
Yet the two authors differ in their requirements for a counterpublic, leading to
divergent conclusions on the state of the black public sphere in contemporary society.
Dawson argues, "A black public sphere does not exist in contemporary America, if by that
                                                        
17
Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,”
115.
14 
we mean a set of institutions, communication networks, and practices which facilitate
debate of causes and remedies to the current combination of political setbacks and
economic devastation facing major segments of the Black community, and which facilitate
the creation of oppositional formations and sites.”18 Harris-Lacewell differentiates her
requirements of a black counterpublic from Dawson’s through her assertion that the
inspection of everyday black experiences reveals distinct signs of oppositional, ideology
shaping discourse. Through a multi-methods approach, Harris-Lacewell details the ways
in which the black counterpublic is sourced in everyday conversation and everyday spaces.
As Harris-Lacewell argues, “For scholars of black politics, Habermas' formulation
does not adequately account for the ways that inequality alters discursive relations
between citizens, nor does it speak to the ways that the relatively powerless are excluded
from the idealized bourgeois space.”19 Harris-Lacewell’s text, then, can be read as a
correction to Habermas’ elision of black discourses. Harris-Lacewell’s ethnographic
inquiries into these spaces outside the surveillance of the dominant elite leads to her claim
that everyday talk is responsible for the creation of hidden transcripts, wherein the
“subjugated develop distinct political realities that often counter the hegemonic narratives
of the powerful.”20
While Habermas understands the bourgeois public sphere as a product of Europe’s
salons – places distinct in their elite, masculine whiteness and undisturbed by minority
                                                        
18
Michael C Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black
Politics,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 197, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org.
19
Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET, 5.
20
Ibid., 4.
15 
influence – Harris-Lacewell understands the black public sphere as a product of places
such as America’s barbershops – spaces distinct in both their blackness and their relative
immunity to white hegemonic intrusion. The evidence provided by Harris-Lacewell
displays how ordinary spaces can be just as important as institutional ones in fostering a
black counterpublic, thereby complicating Dawson’s linkage between the black
counterpublic’s state of decline and a recent history of eroding black institutions that have
less influence on political ideology than they did in the past.
Though the erosion of institutional forces in the black community is an important
aspect to counterpublic development, the scope of this paper is limited to an assessment of
black dialogues outside of institutionalized spaces. I thus proceed in my analysis with the
belief that “the lack of institutional power or widespread coordinated political action [in
the black community] becomes a challenge facing [black counterpublics] rather than
evidence that they do not exist.”21 This paper, through an understanding of black travel as
a black counterpublic space, accepts Harris-Lacewell’s evidence of ideology formation in
everyday spaces as valid and seeks to provide further proof of their relevance to the
political sphere through a qualitative analysis of black travel. Using Harris-Lacewell’s
framework, I will assess the ways in which black travelers’ trips abroad allow them to
operate in diasporic spaces that shift dynamics of hegemony and help travelers write
hidden transcripts that challenge the dominant bourgeois sphere.
The unique travel transcripts that arise from African Americans’ engagement with
diaspora tourism sites reflect the contestatory nature of the discourses that arise when
                                                        
21
Squires, “Rethinking the black public sphere,” 456.
16 
African American travelers journey abroad. Anthropologist Paulla Ebron explains, “African
American appeals to traumatic collective memory and to sustaining ties to African culture
originated in the context of opposition to U.S. national narratives of belonging and tended
to be understood as a subversive formulation of identity.”22 The diasporic sites I
investigate in this paper provide evidence that these oppositional narratives are still at
work in diaspora tourism spaces across the globe. The travel transcripts that emerge from
diasporic engagement hint at the existence of an exchange of ideologies between both the
travelers who comprise African American tour groups and the tour group travelers who
interact with diaspora populations. These international exchanges focus on contentious
matters of black identity, and lead to the transmission of deliberately political messages
that shape the ways in which African Americans think about their positions in a global
diasporic community.
International Counterpublics
The counterpublic spaces described in the various examples put forth by Harris-
Lacewell, Dawson, and other scholars of the black public sphere are helpful in gaining an
understanding of the variety of sites of contestation in black communities. Yet the
counterpublic considered by these social scientists has been provincial in its scope, failing
to thoroughly consider both international and temporary spaces of black political
deliberation such as those created by travel. This oversight is a particularly reckless one
                                                        
22
Paulla A. Ebron, “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics,” American
Ethnologist 26, no. 4 (November 1999): 911, http://www.jstor.org/stable/647237.
17 
due to the diasporic nature of African American identities, the linked fate that African
Americans feel towards blacks throughout the world, and the growing number of African
Americans who are now capable of engaging with diasporic counterpublics through
international travel.23
African Americans’ ties with African diaspora nations have existed since slavery
and persisted in contemporary society despite the fact that for most African Americans,
centuries of separation stand between them and their African roots. Advocacy for
maintaining these ties with the African continent is found primarily in the ideals of Pan-
Africanism but has been consistently adopted throughout history by Civil Rights leaders,
Black Nationalists, the black church, and other institutions and movements within black
communities. These ideals have contributed strongly to the formation of an African
American worldview defined by a blacked linked fate that places the domestic struggle of
African Americans into an international context of black suffering and subordination.24
While this notion of a linked black fate is often considered as a uniquely African
American phenomenon that links black people to each other despite class differentiation,25
data from a 1984 study suggests that African Americans may also feel that their fate is
linked to black people around the world.26 The data from this study show that while 90%
                                                        
23
Aisha Sylvester, “What's the Black Travel Market Worth?,” Black Enterprise 38, no. 6 (January 2008):
54,
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1411148651&Fmt=7&clientId=17210&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
24
Michael C Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, N.J:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 76.
25
Ibid., 48.
26
James S. Jackson, Patricia Gurin, and Shirley Hatchett, National Black Election Panel Study, 1984 and
1988, ICPSR ed, National Black Election Study Series (Ann Arbor, MI: The Institute for Social Research,
University of Michigan, March 3, 1989), Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
18 
of black respondents say they “feel close to black people in this country”, 69% of black
respondents also believe they share a common fate with blacks who reside outside the
United States.27 This perceived connection between African Americans and global black
communities suggests that African American travel throughout the diaspora holds unique
possibilities for the creation of international black counterpublic discourses.
As Fraser points out, however, the notion of an international or transnational
public sphere can at first glance appear oxymoronic. By Habermas’ definition, in order for a
public sphere to engage in political deliberation its members must share a community or
polis in which to rationally expound upon political ideas.28 Fraser argues this
understanding of community is one that is narrowly “informed by a Westphalian political
imaginary” that has “tacitly assumed the frame of a bounded political community with its
own territorial state.”29 Yet in a world in which boundaries have become far easier to
traverse than ever before, it seems possible to many in academia and beyond for spheres to
be forged that transcend sovereign bounds through globalization mechanisms such as
cyber communication and travel.30
While opposing bodies of equally substantial literature alternately support the
existence and deny the possibility of global public spheres, my concern in this paper is the
African American counterpublic and not a transnational black one. This distinction
                                                        
27
Katherine Tate et al., The 1984 National Black Election Study Sourcebook (Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for
Social Research, 1987).
28
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 3.
29
Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Post-Westphalian World On the Legitimacy and
Efficacy of Public Opinion in a,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007): 8.
30
Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Unbounded Publics: Transgressive Public Spheres, Zapatismo, and Political
Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
19 
becomes complicated when studying the movement of a counterpublic discourse into a
foreign space, and it thus becomes necessary to limit this paper to a one-sided analysis of
the impact of transient travel discourses. The evidence that I will present in this paper
suggests the thriving counterpublic discourses that African Americans engage in when
visiting black diaspora locations are primarily predicated on the interactions between
African Americans and the black men and women whom they encounter in their travels.
According to Fraser’s hypothetical, post-modern definition of public spheres, such
interactions may constitute a transnational sphere because of their ability to “overflow the
bounds of nations and states.”31 Yet while travel may, indeed, foster a transnational black
public sphere, African American studies scholar Catherine Squires warns the academic
community to withhold such a designation without first carefully analyzing whether a
transnational counterpublic fosters ideology formation and political engagement for both
national communities.32
While my evidence is limited as to what extent travel interactions between African
Americans and black diaspora members help foster the creation of political discourses in
the global black counterpublic, the evidence from my analysis of African American travel
overwhelming suggests that these interactions serve as informants of a distinctly African
American discourse that strongly shapes black travelers’ ideologies. The supposition of
this study is one that rejects the dominant understandings of cultural and political flows
between First and Third World countries and suggests instead that counterpublic
                                                        
31
Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Post-Westphalian World On the Legitimacy and Efficacy
of Public Opinion in a,” 7.
32
Squires, “Rethinking the black public sphere.”
20 
collisions between blacks from these two worlds are critical in shaping African Americans’
understandings of personal political ideologies. While prevailing attitudes suggest that
American ideals are continuously transmitted to foreign societies through hegemonic
globalization mechanisms,33 the focus of this study is instead on the ways in which black
diasporas and homelands serve as emissaries of political thought and cultural forms to the
first world through a form of “globalization from below.”34
It is also important to note the transient properties of the travel discourses I will
be discussing in this paper in comparison to the relatively permanent or recurring
discourses that Harris-Lacewell and Dawson discuss. While Harris-Lacewell focuses her
study of counterpublic spaces on everyday interactions and Dawson looks to institutions
and structures, I will contend that out of the ordinary, un-institutionalized experiences
present similarly valid spaces for counterpublic discourse. I assert that these fleeting travel
encounters with foreign blackness are naturally discursive sites, and are worthy of further
social scientific examination.
In “A Free Black Mind is a Concealed Weapon: Institutions and Social
Movements in the African Diaspora,” scholar and filmmaker Robin J. Hayes argues that
cross-national dialogues between institutions in Africa and the United States offer
“opportunities to devise and exemplify alternatives to white supremacist practices.”35
While Hayes considers cross-national dialogues through an institutional framework,

                                                        
33
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Worlds v. 1
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
34
Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity
(Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2000).
35
Robin J. Hayes, “'A Free Black Mind is a Concealed Weapon': Institutions and Social Movements in the
African Diaspora,” Souls 9, no. 3 (2007): 226.
21 
through an assessment of the interactions between Historically Black Colleges and
Universities and African liberation organizations in the 1960s, there is flexibility in her
argument that enables the application of her theories to exchanges between individual
actors of the black diaspora.
Despite her focus on the institutions involved, Hayes highlights the centrality of
personal experiences in fostering relationships between African independence and Black
Power activists. Hayes argues that in order for cross-national discourse to exist, they
must be set in emancipated spaces, or “physically and intellectually safe areas within the
African diaspora that are organized by anti-racist activists, such as conferences, salons or
more intimate gatherings, where frank dialogues and earnest interpersonal exchanges
between activists of African descent can take place.”36 Using Hayes’ definition, black
tourist destinations and tourist experiences can also be understood as emancipated spaces,
wherein individual African Americans may temporarily engage in discourses on black
diaspora ideologies outside the surveillance of white hegemony. By placing African
Americans into contact with foreign black spheres in majority-black cultures, diaspora
tourism creates discursive arenas for travelers to engage with counter-hegemonic
ideologies.
The Black Travelogue
Though the focus of this study is on the travel of African Americans to locations of
the black diaspora, much of what exists in black travelers’ narratives concerns the travel of
                                                        
36
Ibid.
22 
African Americans to European destinations. The uniqueness of black travel to diaspora
locations, however, provided the impetus for this investigation into the ways in which
travel impacts the development of transitory counterpublics. Prior to discussing the ways
in which diaspora tourism produces a unique terrain for ideology formation, however, it is
useful to review the body of literature that has historically concerned itself with foreign
black travel. This body of literature lends itself to the notion that black travel has been a
historically transformative experience, and that time spent abroad for African Americans
has been routinely liberatory.
The most complete collection of African American travel writing limited to
explorations of the Black Atlantic exists in Alasdair Pettinger’s anthology, Always
Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. Pettinger explains that he compiled the anthology
in hopes of joining a growing chorus of critics challenging, “The way the canon of ‘great
works’ of travel writing has tended to automatically privilege white men.”37 Pettinger’s
compilation attempts to re-conceptualize travel writing, removing its limited associations
with privileged white males exploring the exotic for sport and expanding the
understanding of travel as a potentially transformative experience for marginalized,
oppressed communities. Pettinger’s anthology is useful in situating the contemporary
deliberations of black travelers into a history of similar discourses. Pettinger argues that
black travel writing evidences the struggle of its authors to contend with particular and
                                                        
37
Alasdair Pettinger, ed., Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, The Black Atlantic (London:
Cassell, 1998), xii.
23 
recurring issues, and offers a suitable framework for assessing contemporary discourses of
black travel38:
The Right to Travel
Pettinger argues that the desire by African Americans to travel internationally has
been routinely hindered by obstacles placed in their way by the state. He claims that in
addition to the structural barriers provided by passport requirements, proofs of citizenship,
and immigration restrictions, cultural expectations have also served as barriers to black
travel. The concept of blacks traveling for pleasure, on their own accord, stands in
contrast to the ways in which history has confined the movement of black bodies. The
right to travel thus becomes a defining characteristic of black travel narratives, and is a
right that my contemporary interview subjects call upon as one of the motivations for their
travel.
Racial Borders
Once the obstacles of travel are overcome, black tourists find themselves in
societies with racial orders and norms that are far different to what they are used to.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argues, “Not only does a journey transport us over
enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social
                                                        
38
Ibid., chap. introduction.
24 
scale.”39 This confrontation with a new, foreign racial identity can shatter Americanized
preconceptions of race. Pettinger’s collection is a convincing record of “foreign travel
offering a (temporary) respite from racism.”40 The examples provided by Pettinger
illustrate the confusing racial reality that accompanies travels into foreign racial terrain.
The contemporary travel narratives provided by my interview subjects suggest this
confusion plays a vital role in the formation of counterpublic discourses that gain strength
from alternate notions of blackness.
Sm all W orlds
Pettinger argues that the emphasis of white travel narratives on the individual
traveler is not seen in black travel narratives. He views conventional, or white travel
narratives as tales of a “mobile, singular author and static, plural ‘natives,”41 whereas black
travel narratives continually evoke a sense of a small world racial solidarity that focuses
more on fellow travelers than it does on the quest for an Other. The diasporic rendezvous
that Pettinger highlights in the writings of historic groups of African American travelers
are repeated in the contemporary narratives of African American tour group participants
who travel to foreign destinations as a distinct public sphere or “small world” and seek
out those they believe share their culture.
                                                        
39
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York:
Penguin (Non-Classics), 1992), 104-105.
40
Pettinger, Always Elsewhere, xiv.
41
Ibid., xv.
25 
D ivided Loyalties
Historic travel narratives that emerged from movement within the Black Atlantic
confirm the relevance of contemporary tourist struggles with national identity. Pettinger
highlights the voices of African Americans who have historically used cosmopolitanism as
a means of escaping loyalty to a nation towards which they have no reason to be grateful.
The particularly embittered position towards the United States that middle class African
Americans hold make this cosmopolitan worldview an attractive one as they set off on
journeys into the black diaspora.
Yet Pettinger finds that travel does not completely liberate African Americans from
their U.S. identity, claiming, “There is rarely an unambiguous declaration of allegiance to
a single country…but rare too is the romance of world citizenship. More common is bi-
national identity in which the disappointments of one and the compensation of another
coexist, often in creative tension.”42 It is my intention in this paper to highlight the ways
in which these tensions, and the compensation that accompanies travel to diasporic
communities, are effective in creating black counterpublic discourses that rely on diasporic
identity construction in order to resist the dominant narratives of white America that have
forced African Americans to live with a destructive double consciousness.
                                                        
42
Ibid., xvii.
26 
Black Travel Trends
In order to study black travel as a source of counterpublic discourse, it is crucial to
understand the trends and habits that make such travel unique. Though formal social
scientific research on African American tourism has been extremely limited, market
research companies and trade organizations have assembled useful data to help in outlining
the motivations, goals, and demands of the black traveler. The key trends are explained
below.
Group Travel
Perhaps the most important element to black travel abroad, particularly as it relates
to counterpublic discourse, is the overwhelming preference and tendency of African
American tourists to travel with groups of other African Americans. Compared to travelers
overall, nearly three times as many African Americans take part in travel with a group.43
This statistic, though significant, is indicative of all forms of travel and does not reflect
further evidence that suggests an even greater proportion of travelers to the diaspora insist
on traveling with other African Americans. Conversations with travel agents and black
travelers, as well as an exhaustive search for travel opportunities to black destinations
online suggests that unless it is a part of convention or business travel, black travel to
destinations in the diaspora almost always involves a group component.
                                                        
43
Gloria Herbert, “Tapping into the Burgeoning African American Travel Market” (Black Meetings and
Tourism).
27 
As Maya Angelou writes in her travelogue All God’s Children Need Traveling
Shoes, “There is a kinship among wanderers, as operative as the bond between bishops or
the tie between thieves.”44 Through interactions anywhere from their seats on a trans-
Atlantic plane ride from New York to Ghana to the pool bar at a resort in Brazil, African
Americans unite as wanderers to create “black dialogic spaces” that are, due to the nature
of diaspora or roots tourism, primed for conversations that “instill in African Americans a
heightened sense of racial group identification and consciousness.”45 Research by Michael
Hecht, Ronald Jackson, and Sidney Ribeau demonstrate that all-black dialogues (i.e.
conversations between members of a group of African Americans) are helpful in reaffirming
black racial identity.46 These dialogues, when they occur among small groups of travelers,
are rooted in what Harris-Lacewell claims is a “black common sense”, or a shared
understanding of blackness as “identifiable, persistent over time, and relevant to making
personal life decision.”47
Black interview subjects repeatedly made clear the ways in which their travel was
not only a cultural or emotional journey, but also one rooted in a belief that the cultural
and emotional aspects of interacting with other African Americans in diasporic travel could
produce a “nurturing commonality of sensual experience.”48 Harris-Lacewell’s link
between these experiences and ideology formation is central to an understanding of travel
                                                        
44
Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1986), 8.
45
Reuel Reuben Rogers, Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or
Exit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 179.
46
Michael L Hecht, Ronald L Jackson, and Sidney A Ribeau, African American Communication: Exploring
Identity and Culture, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2003).
47
48
Ibid., 24.
28 
as a site for collective, group exploration of varied black ideological possibilities.49 Political
scientist Reuel Rogers claims that conversations about shared black experiences are what
“reinforce African-American group identity, sustain a historical memory about the group’s
racial suffering, and convey values and lessons for how to make sense of the political
world, respond to discrimination, and improve group conditions. In short, [they] are sites
of political learning.”50
Knowledge of black preference for group travel is particularly helpful in
appreciating the motivations behind diaspora tourism. Despite recognizing the intensely
personal nature of a return to Africa or an exploration of Bahia, historic travel narratives
and contemporary interview subjects repeatedly evidence a desire to join a greater
“movement” of people in reconnecting with diasporic communities. This movement of an
entire black public sphere out of the United States and into a greater Black Atlantic is one
element of this paper’s inquiry as I seek to map out the ways in which African Americans
create a temporary counterpublic with their fellow African American travelers, and then
experience a complication of that discourse through a collision with diasporic
counterpublics abroad.
M oney & Travel in Black Communities
The ways in which socioeconomic status impacts the political ideology of African
Americans is also an important consideration in an analysis of black travelers. African
American tourists traveling solo and in groups predominantly come from middle-class to
                                                        
49
Ibid., 23-25.
50
Rogers, Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation, 39.
29 
upper-middle class communities that historically hold unique positions on racial issues.51
In Facing up to the American Dream, political scientist Jennifer Hochschild claims that
African Americans from middle class backgrounds have complicated relationships with the
dominant discourses of the United States that make them far more likely than poor and
lower class African Americans to reject the validity of the “American Dream” in
contemporary society.
In 1993, Bill Clinton described the Dream as a “simple but powerful one – if you
work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-
given ability will take you.”52 Yet the social realities of African American life suggest to
many members of the black middle class that a full realization of the dream may not always
be as easy to achieve as the dominant sphere claims. Hochschild points to survey data
which suggests, “Well-off African Americans see more racial discrimination than do poor
blacks, see less decline in discrimination, expect less improvement in the future, and claim
to have experienced more in their own lives.”53
This bitterness among middle and upper middle class blacks towards the dominant
spheres of the United States makes their counterpublic discourse particularly conscious of
racial identity and more inclined towards an evocation of a global black resistance
consistent with Black Nationalist ideologies. My evidence suggests that those travelers
                                                        
51
Melvin Foote et al., “African Diaspora Tourism Products: Bringing the African Diaspora to Africa -
Moderated by Dr. Chika Onyeani.” (Panel presented at the U.S. Africa Tourism Seminar, Washington,
D.C., February 20, 2009).
52
William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents 29, no. 48 (December 6, 1993): 2494-2504,
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.fedreg/wcpd02948&id=1&div=&collection=presidents.
53
Jennifer L Hochschild, Facing up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73.
30 
who believe they have experienced economic success without racial progress seek out
dialogues with foreign black actors who they believe have achieved a certain level of
freedom unfamiliar to them. Further evidence suggests that these black travelers
deliberately search for foreign black spaces that reinforce positive associations with their
own achievements. The resulting dialogues contribute to African American travelers’
explorations of foreign black strategies of empowerment and inward reflections on their
own self-determined success. I assert that the shared pessimism of middle and upper
middle class blacks towards the American Dream may, in fact, be a crucial motivator in
their exploration of international sites of blackness.
When African Americans arrive at some sites, their experiences can be
inspirational, contestatory, and transformative because of their ability to temporarily
displace feelings of bitterness with an optimistic vision of diasporic unity and collective
resistance to hegemonic oppression. On the contrary, other sites may incite rage through
their elucidation of the ways in which African Americans have historically and
contemporarily been the subjects of white oppression. Regardless of which emotions
certain sites elicit, African American tourists, due to their homogenous racial and
socioeconomic composition, are often able to share “collective experiences, survival tales,
and grievances [that] form the basis of a historical consciousness, [the] group’s
recognition of what it has witnessed, and what it can anticipate in the near future.”54
These shared visions become politically relevant if reconsidered as master frames
                                                        
54
Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (London ; New
York: Verso, 1995), 187.
31 
employed by travelers to both better understand forces of racial injustice and to craft a
collectively resistant black identity.55
D estination D eterminants
Black travelers also indicate their desire to escape the white hegemony that
dominates their everyday life through a careful investigation of the friendliness of potential
destinations towards their race.56 A.L. Hawksworth argues, “Tourism patterns are not an
accidental phenomenon; they are usually constructed around the needs and behaviour of
social groups.”57 Research findings suggest that African Americans seek out destinations
where they are surrounded by those of their race and may come in contact with reminders
of a shared diasporic heritage. When black travelers are deciding on where to travel and
with whom to travel, they assess each destination in search of what tourism researchers
call “welcome signs” – displays of diversity and blackness that signal whether travel to
that particular destination can allow for the kind of escape from hegemony that they are in
pursuit of while traveling abroad.58
Diaspora locations become an attractive option for African Americans because they
are not only guaranteed cultural attractions that are uniquely black, but they are also
                                                        
55
W. K. Carroll and R. S. Ratner, “Master Frames and Counter-Hegemony: Political Sensibilities in
Contemporary Social Movements*,” Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie 33, no. 4
(1996): 407-435; W. K. Carroll and R. S. Ratner, “Master framing and cross-movement networking in
contemporary social movements,” Sociological Quarterly (1996): 601-625.
56
Black Gold, Part I: Travel, Financial Services, Technology and Books Are Untapped Mines in the African-
American Market (Chicago, IL: Hunter Miller Group, 2003).
57
AL Hawksworth, “Race and Ethnic Minorities in Tourism: The Black population, their travel patterns
and explanations,” in Free from prejudice? Race and ethnicity in shaping access to tourism (presented at the
Who controls the tourism experience? Access and behaviour in the 21st century, University of Lincoln,
2008), http://www.cometravel.lincoln.ac.uk/papers/submission.php?paper=327.
58
Black Gold, Part I: Travel, Financial Services, Technology and Books Are Untapped Mines in the African-
American Market.
32 
guaranteed a level of diversity that they cannot find in the United States. In deciding to
travel to a diaspora location, African Americans often make an implied commitment to
searching for certain racial connections.
While research suggests that black tourism to European destinations such as
London and Paris is also quite strong,59 this variety of tourism (to Western destinations)
does not expose African Americans to a racial order drastically different than the one they
operate within at home. Though European travel experiences are certainly capable of
fostering political transformation – as some of the African American communities’ most
prolific twentieth century writers have stressed – my focus on diaspora locations is
motivated by a desire to assess whether travel to majority black foreign cultures uniquely
enables African Americans travelers to escape the eye of Western society’s bourgeois
sphere and write hidden, oppositional transcripts. I suggest that in these emancipated
spaces, African American travelers engage in liberatory discourses on black political
identity that differ from those discourses that play out in other destinations to which
blacks journey.
Though incursions by the dominant sphere are to be expected almost anywhere on
the globe today, both destinations I analyze are defined by their existence at least
somewhat outside the reach of the First World. Minority white cultures may still have a
strong influence on the dominant discourse of diaspora communities – particularly where
vestiges of colonialist domination more obviously endure – but the simple realization by a
                                                        
59
Hugh Schofield, “Boom for black tourism in Paris,” BBC, April 28, 2005, sec. Europe,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4480589.stm; “Changing the guard with black tourism,” BBC, July 16,
2003, sec. Magazine, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3068973.stm.
33 
black traveler that the majority of the faces surrounding her are no longer white is
routinely described as an ideologically distressing experience that can catalyze identity
crises. This type of visual cue, along with more subtle ones highlighted in travel
narratives, assist the black traveler in transitioning into spaces in which they may become
more willing to engage in oppositional discourses with both fellow travelers and diasporic
counterpublics.
Black Travel & The Black Atlantic
The work of Paul Gilroy on double consciousness among members of the Black
Atlantic is an integral part of any study of African Americans traveling throughout this
space. Gilroy’s foremost assertion, that black identity is an ongoing process of cultural
exchange facilitated by travel throughout the Black Atlantic, is the basis for understanding
tourism as an agent of such exchange. Gilroy suggests that African American political and
cultural formation must occur outside the structures of nationhood, in spaces that are not
occupied by the constraining particularities of the state. He argues that this space, the
Black Atlantic, is the primary location for a transnational discourse on black identity and
double consciousness. For the sake of fully illustrating Gilroy’s claims, the opening of his
widely discussed work, The Black Atlantic, is excerpted below:
Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of

double consciousness. By saying this I do not mean to suggest that taking
on either or both of these unfinished identities necessarily exhausts the
subjective resources of any particular individual. However, where racist,
nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourse orchestrate political
relationships so that these identities appear to be mutually exclusive,
34 
occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their

continuity has been viewed as a provocative and even oppositional act of
political insubordination.60
When black Americans travel abroad, they step into the precise space that Gilroy
outlines as an in-between space of provocation and political insubordination. The double-
consciousness that Du Bois and Gilroy both claim as universal among African Americans
is complicated when black travelers enter spaces where “Negro” and “American” take on
entirely different meanings than their domestic ones. The black traveler’s identity as both
a citizen of America and a member of a global, transnational black Atlantic becomes the
basis for postmodern discourses on notions of self, nationhood, and the state. These
discourses, as they relate to travel, are not necessarily centered on lasting diasporic
alliances and Pan-African politics,61 but are instead engaged in this paper through the
study of fleeting African American encounters with foreign blackness. The purpose of this
study is to assess the effects of these transient discourses on African American politics and
identity.
Gilroy argues that a sense of restlessness dominates the contemporary Black
Atlantic, and that this restlessness is the result of an “in but not of” feeling towards
Western, white society. Hochschild’s work on the opinions of middle class blacks echoes
this claim, detailing the ways in which members of middle class black communities often
feel unsatisfied or unfulfilled by the offerings of America. Gilroy connects these feelings of
                                                        
60
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 1.
61
Dayo F. Gore, “Centering Africa in African American Diasporic Travels and Activism,” Radical History
Review 2009, no. 103 (January 1, 2009): 233,
http://rhr.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/2009/103/230.
35 
alienation to African American communities’ “need to locate cultural or ethnic roots and
then use the ideas of being in touch with them as a means to refigure the cartography of
dispersal and exile.”62 This African American desire to reorient one’s exilic identity is a
“direct response to the varieties of racism which have denied the historical character of
black experience” that middle class African Americans are particularly aware of when they
embark on tours to diaspora locations.63
Gilroy claims that by coming into a consciousness of the limitations of their
existing diasporic agenda, African Americans “[seek] to construct a political agenda in
which the ideal of rootedness [is] identified as a prerequisite for the forms of cultural
integrity that could guarantee the nationhood and statehood to which they aspire.”64 I
contend that in a quest to find these roots, African Americans engage in tourism to
diaspora locations throughout the Black Atlantic in hopes of finding strategies for
preserving cultural integrity as a political weapon.
Complicating Tourism Theory
Because this paper seeks to differentiate the type of travel that African Americans
engage in from the type of travel embarked upon by the everyday tourist, it is essential to
situate such an argument into the scholarly discourse on tourism theory and complicate
preexisting understandings of travel. Specifically, I seek to reject geographer and cultural
critic Dean MacCannell’s seminal conception of tourism as an elusive quest for the Other
                                                        
62
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 112.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
36 
and question the subsequent, equally narrow definition of tourism offered by his critics.
The unique aspects of black travel throughout the diaspora provide intriguing insight into
these travel theories and complicate the universality of the tourist experience.
MacCannell suggests that the tourist’s quest for the Other is motivated by “a
fading of a sense of reality and oneness with the world.”65 This understanding of tourist
motivation is particularly suitable for understanding African American travel. As I have
discussed, quantitative and qualitative studies of the black middle class suggests that
successful African Americans – those in the class that can afford to travel – feel more
alienated from society than the rest of black Americans. Ellis Cose, author of The Rage of
a Privileged Class, argues that these African Americans feel as though America has
defaulted on its promise by failing to ensure proper treatment and respect in return for
ambition, education, and a willingness to play by the rules.66 The type of schism that Cose
documents between middle class African Americans and the dominant public sphere
provides evidence of the “fading sense of…oneness” that MacCannell argues motivates
tourists to travel.
Though MacCannell’s alienation framework applies well to African American
tourism, his preoccupation with tourism’s ultimate quest for the Other is too narrowly
focused.67 MacCannell argues, “Self-discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous
                                                        
65
Ellen Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze (New
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 4.
66
Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 1.
67
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976),
xxi.
37 
search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme of our civilization.”68 Yet, African American
diaspora tourism is evidence of a type of travel that encourages a search not for the
Absolute Other but for something relatively the same. Though the Other, in its traditional
sense, is certainly engaged through black travel, a commitment to finding semblances of
black universality is a common thread in black travel narratives. As sociologist Patricia de
Santana Pinho argues, “In roots tourism, the primary goal is to find the ‘same’, even
though this ‘same’ is usually not quite as ‘similar’ as many tourists expect.”69
MacCannell’s limited understanding of how tourism produces social realities will thus be
expanded in this paper, as black travel narratives provide evidence that transformative
tourism experiences may also be born through an engagement with sameness.
While I argue that MacCannell’s understanding of what comprises authentic travel
is too limited, contemporary critics of his work summarily reject the notion of travel as a
source of authenticity discovery all together. Film and multimedia scholar Ellen Strain
writes:
American culture remains indelibly marked by a more naïve tradition of

cross-cultural contact, a belief in the potential for fulfillment in more private
or personal border crossings. Americans continue to be captivated by the
idea that somewhere on the highest mountain or in the densest jungle the
triumphant traveler, through her perseverance, can stumble upon a political
blank slate where it is possible to step outside the burdens of national
identity to forge contact across cultural divides.70
                                                        
68
Ibid., 5.
69
Patricia de Santana Pinho, “African-American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 35,
no. 3 (May 1, 2008): 72, http://lap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/3/70.
70
Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys.
38 
Yet just as MacCannell’s travel theory is complicated by the existence of black
travels throughout the diaspora, so too are the theories of his critics, who claim that a
“tourist gaze” inhibits the ability of travel to serve as a transformative experience.71 Black
travel narratives of the past as well as those offered by my respondents suggest that even
if the tourist gaze is in place, it does not hinder the ability of the traveler to use foreign
terrain as an emancipated space for identity reflection.
MacCannell’s detractors, in focusing too much of their criticism on whether travel
can ever truly be authentic, fail to recognize the importance of travel as a source of identity
crisis. These critics attempt to outline the ways in which tourism disappoints the traveler
by offering inauthentic and commercialized culture in place of the authentic. I contend,
however, that even the consumption of an inauthentic tourist experience facilitates an
important engagement with questions of alienation, authenticity, and hierarchy in the
black Atlantic. The questions that result from a black traveler’s quest for authenticity are
inherently linked to those that surround black consciousness, universality, and self-
identity. Through their reconsideration of identity and their creation of counterpublic
discourses in the emancipated spaces of the black diaspora, black travelers lend evidence to
a broader conception of the effects of tourism.
                                                        
71
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications,
1990).
39 
 
Chapter Two
Capoeira, Candomblé, and Carnaval:

Emancipated and Problematized Spaces in
Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
I felt very much at home in Brazil. I was free. I became myself. It was as though I had been
carrying a heavy load on my back and when I got to Brazil I just dropped it and forgot about it.
– Eva de Carvalho Chipenda, The Visitor (1996)
Do you have blacks, too?
– U.S. President George W. Bush to Brazilian President Fernando Henrique

Cardoso during a 2002 meeting; according to widely rumored reports in the
72
Brazilian press.
Introduction
razil’s geographic immensity, complicated colonial history, and over five
B hundred year trend of miscegenation have resulted in a country that is today
often defined by its complicated racial structure. As the home to the largest black
population outside of Africa and a society in which race operates differently than it does in
the United States, Brazil has been consistently chosen by Western scholars as a point of
comparison in the study of African American communities in the United States. The
                                                        
72
Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New
York University Press, 2007), 252.
40 
Chapter Two: Capoeira, Candomblé, and Carnaval
interest of the academy in Brazil’s race relations is due in great part to the 1933 publication
of Brazilian social theorist Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves. In the text,
Freyre asserts that a unique racial harmony has been achieved in Brazil through a cordial
colonial system and ongoing acts of miscegenation that serve to whiten, and thus,
integrate society.73
This idea of a country that had broken down traditions of racial classification and
successfully integrated its black population led to an increased interest in the study of
Brazil’s social dynamics. Critical race theorist Jerome Branche argues, “Freyre’s Brazil
emerges in a morally more favorable light when compared to the separatist racial model of
colonial and postcolonial United States, defined by hypodescent, or the ‘one drop’ rule.
Since the U.S. model of legalized segregation and its overt public pursuit of white racial
purity was not operative in Brazil, his country was, by implication, nonracist.”74
In Freyre’s New World in the Tropics: the Culture of Modern Brazil, he asserts that
Brazil is dominated by “a general spirit of human brotherhood [that] is much stronger
than race, color, class or religious prejudice.”75 This optimistic portrayal of race relations
in Brazil spurred intense academic interest in the differences between blackness in Brazil
and the United States. This interest led to a steady stream of scholarly investigation of
Freyre’s notion of Brazil as a racial democracy, and resulted in a decades long academic
discourse dedicated to debunking the notion that Brazil had advanced past the United
                                                        
73
Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-Grande & Senzala); a Study in the Development of
Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd ed., Borzoi books on Latin America (New York: Knopf,
1964).
74
Jerome Branche, Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature (Columbia, Mo: University of
Missouri Press, 2006), 25.
75
Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics; the Culture of Modern Brazil (New York: Knopf, 1959), xxv.
41 
States in the race for equality. By drawing direct comparisons between the relevance of
race in Brazil and the United States and pointing out inconsistencies with the ways in
which Freyre depicted his country, social scientists constructed a responding narrative
that glorified the race relations of America and maligned Freyre’s conception of a
harmonious racial structure in Brazil.76
Though contemporary scholarly discourse surrounding global forms of blackness
has re-ignited a debate over race relations in Brazil, there still exists a recurring “notion
that the black experience in the United States is more ‘modern’ than the one existent in
Brazil.”77 As a result of this perceived dichotomous relationship between the modernity of
the United States and the tradition of Brazil, an assumption persists that Brazil is the
lasting beneficiary in its cultural, political, and economic relations with the United States.
Anthropologist Patricia de Santana Pinho’s, Decentering the United States in the
Studies of Blackness in Brazil, however, argues for a re-orientation of the ways in which
we look at cultural and political flows between these two countries. In revisiting the
history of Afro-Brazilian interactions with the Black Atlantic, Pinho highlights Brazil’s
role not only as a recipient but also as an emissary of the “objects, symbols and ideas that
circulate throughout these routes.”78 In this chapter, I seek to confirm the role of Brazil as
an emissary of cultural forms and argue that African American tourists, in receipt of these
transmissions, undergo an education in resistance. While the theoretical framework that

                                                        
76
Brian Owensby, “Toward a History of Brazil's "Cordial Racism": Race Beyond Liberalism,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 47, no. 02 (2005): Abstract,
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=289932.
77
Patricia de Santana Pinho, “Decentering the United States in the studies of blackness in Brazil,” Revista
Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 2 (2006): 1.
78
Ibid., 9.
42 
explains this cross-directional movement of ideas between black diaspora communities
should be attributed to Paul Gilroy, Gilroy’s complete omission of Brazil from his
description of a Black Atlantic qualifies this chapter, in turn, as a corrective to that text’s
oversight.
The lack of mainstream acceptance of a Black Atlantic in which racial strategies
may be transmitted to the United States instead of just from it is illustrated in journalist
Charles Whitaker’s description of Brazil’s shifting racial strategy: “A new day is dawning
for Afro-Brazilians. After decades in which military dictators preached that complete
amalgamation was the cure-all for festering racial tensions, Brazilians of African descent,
taking their cues from Black Americans, are in the throes of a consciousness-raising
movement” [emphasis added].79 This U.S.-centric understanding of informational flows is
countered in this chapter by tales of African American tourists looking to Brazil as a
source of racial and political inspiration. From their observation of the ways in which
women move their bodies during Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival to their confusion over how
black religious ceremonies overtake entire Brazilian cities, African American travelers are
quick to remark on the ways in which black life in Brazil is an entirely different experience
from the black life they know at home.
These events shape their perceptions of what it means to be black in a global
context and serve to empower their sense of black pride and political efficacy. Though
these events may seem to be merely fleeting tourist encounters, the evidence from black
                                                        
79
Charles Whitaker, “Blacks in Brazil--The Myth and the Reality,” Ebony 46, no. 4 (February 1991): 62,
43 
travel narratives suggests that transient discourses can take on transformative qualities by
imbuing in travelers “a sense of group pride and positive affective posture towards
blacks,”80 that goes hand in hand with a sense of personal and political efficacy.81 As one
respondent explained, “Brazil is the place you go when you need to fill up your empty
tank.”82
By situating their previously held ideologies into foreign black counterpublic
spaces, African American travelers return from Brazil both endowed with a stronger belief
in the self-determination of blacks and educated in new strategies of resistance. This
chapter attempts to show the ways in which African Americans travel to diaspora
locations in order to deliberately engage with counterpublics they assume can affirm their
belief in the abilities of blacks around the globe to challenge hegemonic discourses. It
further attempts to explain the ways in which counterpublic collisions in Brazil are
uniquely capable of creating hidden transcripts of resistance outside the surveillance of the
Anglophone world. Through an analysis of subspaces within two cities – Rio de Janeiro
and Salvador de Bahia – this paper seeks to assess the validity of Brazil as an emancipated
space despite the existence of troubling subaltern spaces within the country that may
resemble some of America’s most closely surveilled black counterpublics.
Brazil’s racial composition varies across the entire country and within every region
and city. As a result, certain spaces may actually look and feel more emancipated to African
                                                        
80
Richard L. Allen, Michael C. Dawson, and Ronald E. Brown, “A Schema-Based Approach to Modeling
an African-American Racial Belief System,” The American Political Science Review 83, no. 2 (June 1989):
423, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1962398.
81
Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).
82
Vince, telephone interview with the author. December 29, 2008.
44 
American tourists than others. In this chapter I suggest that discussions with former
travelers to Brazil, an adherence to strict group travel itineraries, and most importantly, an
intense tourist desire, leads African Americans to emancipated spaces in a quest for
empowerment. These factors, however, also lead to travelers’ avoidance of other possible
sites of resistance that are not as widely marketed or carry negative connotations that may
disrupt the intended results of black diasporic travel.
I will conclude this chapter with the suggestion that African American tourists to
Brazil, through their interactions with specific sacred and profane counterpublic spaces, are
transformed through efficacy-enhancing encounters with what they perceive to be
successfully resistant black cultural forms such as Candomblé, Capoeira, and Carnival.
While these transformations do not result in a universal acceptance of one, traditionally
African American ideology, the transformations suggest the importance of Brazil as a host
to religious-like experiences that foster political participation among African Americans
through their promotion of group identity and racial consciousness.83
Baianidade in Salvador de Bahia
African American travelers to Brazil typically follow a well-traveled path that has
been mapped out by those in their communities who traveled to the country before them.
This itinerary repetition is indicative of the ways in which black travelers look to others in
order to ensure deliberate encounters with the culture and heritage of Brazil’s black
                                                        
83
Fredrick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (New York: Oxford
45 
communities. Los Angeles Times writer Ron Harris describes the process by which the
African Americans he interviewed came to decide on venturing to Salvador de Bahia, the
city in Brazil considered most closely tied to African traditions:
Attorney Ray Williams heard about it from the shoeshine man in his
Newark, N.J., office building.
Lauren Greene, marketing director for a New York City college, had seen a
small ad in Upscale, a monthly magazine aimed at African Americans.
Tanya Stewart, project manager for the Chicago Housing Authority, got
the word from her boss.
So, unlike most first-time tourists to Brazil, each bypassed the famous
beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the restaurants and nightlife of Sao Paulo, and
the northeastern resorts of Recife and Fortaleza to come to Salvador, a city
rarely mentioned in the United States as a vacation destination.84
The means by which African Americans determine where to travel is significant in
understanding their experiences once they arrive at their destination. In the case of travel
to Bahia, engagement with counterpublic discourses and travel articles in both black and
mainstream medias prior to travel heighten the expectations that black travelers hold and
help prime them for a potentially liberatory experience.85 Brazil is painted by these former
travelers to the country as a space in which Africa lives on,86 and as a second home that
offers alternatives to the traditional African American notions of politics, religion, culture,
                                                        
84
Ron Harris, “U.S. Blacks Seek a Part of Their History in Brazil,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1994,
sec. A,
85
“Bahia's Candomblé,” Black Enterprise, August 1987,
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=195288&Fmt=7&clientId=17210&RQT=309&VName=PQD;
Kerry Luft, “Seeking kinship with Brazil's blacks,” Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1995,
86
de Santana Pinho, “African-American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” 72.
46 
and family.87
Advertisements that appear in African American magazines and on African American
travel websites tap into the desire of black travelers to find alternate forms of blackness
during their time in Brazil by highlighting three distinctly Afro-Brazilian spaces: the
terreiros where Candomblé ceremonies occur, the rodas or public circles where capoeiristas
practice, and the schools, blocos afros, and festivals that celebrate Afro-Brazilian music and
culture during Carnaval. I suggest that through an engagement with these manifestations
of the Afro-Brazilian counterpublic, black travelers subsume aspects of distinctly Afro-
Brazilian ideologies of resistance and black empowerment into previously held or newly
acquired African American ideologies such as Black Feminism and Black Nationalism.
Black travelers to Salvador often have trouble articulating what it is about the
Bahian way of life that so appeals to them. They describe a “vibe” or a “feeling in the air”.
They talk of the way the woman carry themselves, the vivacity with which the men dance,
the random party that breaks out on the street corner next to their hotel.88 Through the
literature they read about Brazil prior to departure, the discussions they have with friends
who have traveled there before, and the actual tourist encounters that they experience
when they reach Bahia, African American travelers construct an image of Brazil as a
racially liberated space that challenges Western academia’s portrayal of an oppressive
racial order.
                                                        
87
Thomas Allen Harris, E Minha Cara (That's My Face), DVD (Wellspring Media, 2003).
88
The discussion of the general sentiment and feelings of travelers is based on numerous conversations held
with African American tourists through phone conversations and ethnographic encounters in Brazil. I do not
intend to universalize the experience of black travelers, but instead to swiftly summarize the reactions of a set
of respondents. In cases where I wish to highlight the particular opinions of a traveler, direct quotations will
be attributed pseudonymously.
47 
Scholar of Brazilian culture Chris Dunn claims that this image of Bahia is derived
from African American tourists’ interactions with the convergence of a multitude of social
and political beliefs that are “central to the discourse of baianidade, which in its
contemporary form typically combines a celebratory affirmation of blackness and black
culture with notions about cordial, non-confrontational race relations, sensuality, aesthetic
beauty, and specific performative competences.”89
Recent critics of this solely aesthetic understanding of baianidade, however, argue
that the underlying forms that constitute this worldview each flourish in inherently
political spaces. Afro-Brazilian scholars such as Piers Armstrong claim that forces emerge
through resistant counterpublic discourses in Capoeira, Candomblé, and samba
communities that represent a collective, subaltern sphere that “changes the social
mentality to more politicized terms while retaining the aesthetic energies characteristic of
Bahian popular culture.”90 These resistant counterpublics that African American tourists
collide with are possible sources of those travelers’ ideology reconsiderations. While
African Americans’ interactions with this baianidade discourse may appear on the surface
to be simply observational, their resulting narratives tell of a diasporic engagement that
reveal unique, Afro-Brazilian ideologies. These ideologies are often motivated by cultural
forms that appear, at least on the surface, to be politically innocuous, but upon further
inspection reveal their inherent political aims.
                                                        
89
Christopher Dunn, “Black Rome and the Chocolate City: The Race of Place,” Callaloo 30, no. 3 (2007):
852, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v030/30.3dunn.html.
90
Piers Armstrong, “Moralizing Dionysus and Lubricating Apollo: A Semantic Topography of Subject
Construction in Afro-Bahian Carnival,” Luso-Brazilian Review 38, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 29-30,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513963.
48 
Candomblé
One of the primary tourist sites that expose Brazil’s culture of black resistance are
the terreiros of Candomblé, the intimate spaces in which Afro-Brazilians worship a
syncretic system of beliefs that preserves historically undercut the Catholicism imposed by
Portuguese colonists through its retention of traditions from Yoruba religions.
Candomblé’s relationship with the dominant sphere has historically been an adversarial
one, as Brazil’s ruling classes sought to retain their status and privilege through racist
strategies designed to stigmatize Candomblé practices. Scholar of African religious
tradition in Brazil Neil Lopes explains, “The Brazilian ruling elites sought to portray
black religious practice as folklore, to annihilate its role as an agent of change.”91
In response to these dominant strategies of oppression, Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
worshippers were forced to disguise their Orishas, or deities, with corresponding Catholic
saints. With these disguises in place, Candomblé worshippers were able to give the
impression that they were celebrating a Catholic saint along with the dominant sphere
while actually worshipping their own deities in Candomblé’s counterpublic spaces. Lopes
describes this strategy as resistance through negotiation,92 and it is this strategy that
African American tourists so often highlight when describing the Candomblé services they
take part in while traveling through Bahia.
Anthropologist Mattijs Van de Port traveled to Brazil in 2005 to investigate
                                                        
91
Nei Lopes, “African Religions in Brazil, Negotiation, and Resistance: A Look From Within,” Journal of
Black Studies 34, no. 6 (July 1, 2004): 839, http://jbs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/838.
92
Ibid., 859.
49 
Candomblé’s role in contemporary Brazil.93 While much has been written about the
counterpublic resistance that Candomblé has fostered in the past, Van de Port sought to
determine whether these resistance strategies are still in place and how useful they are to
Brazil’s contemporary political realm. Van de Port arrived in Bahia with the assumption
that the cult of Candomblé would be a secret and hidden part of Bahian society,
institutionalized and confined to Salvador’s terreiros. But Van de Port soon found that
Candomblé was elemental to the public sphere, and so he begins his ethnography with the
conversations about Candomblé that he encounters in an upscale beauty parlor, the
ultimate everyday space.94 In much the same ways that Harris-Lacewell maps out the
importance of these spaces in creating counterpublic discourses, Van de Port points to
similar spaces in Brazil as evidence of the infiltration of a previously suppressed discourse
into the public sphere.
The ubiquity of Candomblé in Salvador is not only obvious to ethnographers, but
also to tourists who travel throughout the heart of black Salvador. One cannot go more
than a few blocks in any direction without noticing the recurring Candomblé symbols that
adorn souvenirs or the tourism industry’s hard sell of a sneak peek into the inner workings
of a house of Candomblé. These advertisements are particularly noticeable in the black
heritage destinations that abound in the city. During my visit to Salvador, while walking
around the city’s historically black neighborhood of Pelourinho with a notebook and
                                                        
93
Mattijs Van de Port, “Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black. Re-Scripting the Afro-Brazilian Religious
Heritage in the Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia,” Social Anthropology 13, no. 01 (2005): 3-26,
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=282890.
94
Ibid., 3.
50 
camera in hand, I was stopped multiple times by church employees, street children, tour
guides, and other Afro-Brazilians who saw the potential to connect a traveler interested in
black culture with Bahia’s black religion.
For Afro-Brazilians, black culture and religion are united, a fusion that Salvador’s
tourism board, Bahiatursa, emphasizes in its tourism marketing. Jessica, a middle-aged
female respondent from New York explained, “In Bahia, they [the tourism community]
seem to really be marketing [Candomblé worship]. When they see that you are black and
you are walking along, they really pushed it to the forefront in a way that exposed me to a
part of Brazil I did not expect to find.” Jessica, who visited multiple Candomblé
ceremonies during her week-long stay in Salvador, explained, “I quickly found out that the
African descent population in Brazil uses their culture as a form of resistance, which you
don’t really know before you go there….And it still goes on today? That’s what amazes
me. History and the movies and writings, no one has really embraced that fact. I think it’s
suppressed.”95 Jessica’s statement reflects her belief that though it is easy to find cultural
resistance in Brazil’s public sphere, these forms of global black culture have been
suppressed in America.
During my own travels throughout Salvador, I encountered a group of African
Americans who had traveled down from Atlanta together in search of what one called “a
lost identity.”96 The mixed-gender group told me how they found their way to a
Candomblé ceremony through conversation with a tour guide who had taken them on an
                                                        
95
Jessica, telephone interview with the author. February 22, 2009.
96
Group interview with the author. January 23, 2009. Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.
51 
all-day black heritage tour that morning and urged them to expand upon their newfound
knowledge of Bahia’s past by engaging in a critical part of contemporary black everyday
life. One female member of the group reacted to the ceremony, “I never thought it was
possible for this African spirit to exist outside of Africa…watching the ceremony reminded
me of why I came here, to see how blacks live around the world.” Another member
exclaimed, “Its unbelievable. This sort of thing could never exist in America…and that’s a
shame…I know our histories are different, but there’s something to learn from these
experiences.”97
Interviews I conducted with former travelers to Brazil in the United States echoed
this group’s reaction to Candomblé. Tamara, a 52-year old education administrator
proclaimed, “Being surrounded by that extension of Africa made it clear to me…how
much African Americans have lost…it made me sad that we can’t express ourselves in
America like they do in Brazil.” When I pressed her on the ways in which Candomblé as
religious expression differed from her own religious experiences at home she cried out,
“Are you insane? If blacks did this sort of thing at home they’d be called crazy…just look
at Reverend Wright!”98
These reactions to Brazil’s uniquely black religious sphere indicate the deep desire
of African American travelers to unearth the ways in which Brazilians have managed to
resist cultural and religious oppression and successfully push their uniquely black
counterpublic discourses into the dominant sphere. African American travelers are
                                                        
97
Ibid.
98
Tamara, telephone interview with the author. December 15, 2008.
52 
intrigued by the success of Afro-Brazilians in offsetting cultural colonization through what
Scott calls a “public declaration of the hidden transcript,”99 and derive from their
counterpublic collisions a strategy for how to resist oppression at home.
A pamphlet distributed at Bahiatursa’s many kiosks around Salvador signifies the
acceptance of Candomblé as a vital component of Salvador’s cultural flavor. The pamphlet
describes Candomblé’s “profound influence on Bahian culture…that is honored
throughout the year in beautiful street festivals or in sacred spaces known as terreiros.”100
The existence of these ceremonies in public spaces shared by tourists and Brazilians both
black and white mark their infiltration into the discourses of the public sphere. African
American tourists’ amazement at the public acceptance of black counterpublic discourse
signals their appreciation for the success of separate black institutions in advancing racial
understanding and equality.
These tourists’ interactions with such institutions tap into Black Nationalist
ideologies that espouse “culture as a cohesive force” in the battle against white oppression
of the black psyche.101 Though Candomblé as a cultural form has integrated mainstream
society, its separate sphere of worship and the empowering nature of the hidden
transcripts that result from its practice provide evidence to the everyday tourist of the
ways in which Afro-Brazilians have used culture to achieve the Nationalist goal of public
                                                        
99
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 202.
100
African Heritage in Bahia: Literary, Musical, Sports, Ethno-Political and Gastronomical Itineraries
2008/2009, Brochure (Salvador de Bahia, Brazil: Bahiatursa, 2008).
101
J. L Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002),
124.
53 
black valorization.102
Female African American tourists in particular have historically valued the vital
role of black women in the Candomblé community as evidence of an advancement of a
global feminist agenda. Because of the religion’s revered position in Bahian society,
African American travelers may see black priestesses as inspirational black female leaders
who have asserted their role in Brazil’s racial struggle without black male support.103 One
particular tour package that is almost exclusively marketed to female African American
tourists offers a journey to visit the Irmandade da Boa Morte, or the Sisterhood of the
Good Death. In the small town of Cachoeira outside of Salvador, the Sisterhood is today
comprised of elderly women who put on an enormous celebration of the Assumption of the
Virgin Mary every August.
Tourists from around the world, and specifically African American women from
large urban churches such as Atlanta’s Hillside International Truth Center and Chicago’s
United Trinity Church,104 venture to the celebration, however, mostly to pay their
respects to the Sisterhood’s storied history of resistance during slavery. The Sisterhood
that existed during nineteenth century slavery was comprised of free Afro-Brazilian
women who bonded together under the pretense of religious worship in order to escape
the surveillance of the government, which only permitted freed blacks to organize for
religious purposes. While the Sisters were certainly devoted to their religion, they took on
                                                        
102
Jeffrey Stout, “Theses on Black Nationalism,” in Is It Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power
and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S Glaude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 238.
103
Roger Sansi Roca, “Catholic Saints, African Gods, black masks and white heads Tracing the history of
some religious festivals in Bahia,” Portuguese Studies 21 (October 1, 2005): 182-200,
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mhra/pst/2005/00000021/00000001/art00012.
104
Ibid., 196.
54 
a distinctly political mission in creating a strong, female led abolitionist community in
Bahia that banded together to buy the freedom of slaves. Simultaneously, the Sisters
managed to co-opt aspects of white colonialist religion in order to use “the religion of the
masters, revised, transformed, and appropriated…to harness its power within their
universes of discourse.”105 Over time, the organization became a leading community
organizer and began to reveal the importance of the Candomblé practices they had been
secretly taking part in.106
For contemporary black travelers to Boa Morte, the dignified black women of the
Sisterhood represent to African American travelers “an icon or epiphany of something
transcendent that [reaches] directly to the inner self.”107 While some scholars claim that
contemporary white male politicians exploit their cordial relationship with the Sisterhood
for black votes, African American tourists told ethnographer Roger Sansi Roca that they
viewed any relationship between the Sisters and the politicians as “a necessary
strategy…that revealed nothing more than their intelligence.”108 African American women
tourists thus see the priestesses and Sisters involved with Candomblé as smart, politically
mobilized actors that have used counterpublic spaces for their own empowerment as well
as the empowerment of the black community at-large. The Candomblé worshippers offer
to African American tourists an insight into a Brazilian amalgamation of nationalism and
                                                        
105
Stephen Selka, “The Sisterhood of Boa Morte in Brazil: Harmonious Mixture, Black Resistance, and the
Politics of Religious Practice,” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 13, no. 1 (2008):
97, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7180.2008.00005.x.
106
Raul Lody, “Devoção e culto a Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte,” Rio de Janeiro: Altiva Grafica e Editora
Ltda. (1981).
107
Roca, “Catholic Saints, African Gods, black masks and white heads Tracing the history of some religious
festivals in Bahia,” 196.
108
Ibid.
55 
integrationism: though united behind a separate black institution, these worshippers also
encourage interaction with whites if it serves to further the black cause. For middle class
African Americans, this ideology is particularly appealing, as it suggests that cultural
emancipation from white control is possible even when integration is necessary.
Van de Port suggests that Candomblé operates through a victimhood framework.
“To opt for Candomblé imagery is to invoke all kinds of emotions associated with slavery,
persecution, historical injustice, the denial of a right of existence, the suffering of the weak,
the poor and the miserable.”109 This counterpublic narrative that is sourced in Bahia’s
Candomblé culture is naturally attractive to African American tourists, who repeatedly
describe a sense of awe at the ways in which contemporary Bahian society evidences a
preservation of tradition against dominant suppression. Van de Port argues, “The appeal
of this framing for counter-movements is evident,” as actors including African American
tourists begin to believe “their persecution is our persecution, their suffering is our
suffering.”110 Through their travels to Brazil, African American tourists are exposed to the
resistance narratives constructed by Afro-Brazilians in response to familiar forms of
cultural oppression.
The overt brilliance and majesty of the religious ceremonies that African American
tourists witness serves to reinforce the natural abilities of blacks to construct counter-
movements in the face of cultural and political persecution. Political scientist Fredrick
Harris argues in his seminal text, Something Within, “Religion’s psychological dimension
                                                        
109
Van de Port, “Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black. Re-Scripting the Afro-Brazilian Religious Heritage
in the Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia,” 23.
110
Ibid.
56 
could potentially empower individuals with a sense of competence and resilience, inspiring
them to believe in their own ability...to act politically”111 For African American tourists,
Candomblé worshippers are living proof of this theory and provide black travelers with
empowering examples of the interplay between socio-religious resistance and political
empowerment.
Carnaval
Each year, 700,000 foreigners travel to Rio de Janeiro to watch swarms of
drummers, dancers, and other performers project their Afro-Brazilian pride throughout the
entire city. Though Carnaval finds its origins in Europe’s seventeenth century pre-lent
balls, today’s celebration is derived from distinctly black cultural forms that grow out of
Rio de Janeiro’s underclass black population.112 The convergence of uniquely black
representations of dance, religion, and gender has, since the 1930s, resulted in the
formation of distinct samba schools that emerge each February to compete against each
other in front of the entire city of Rio de Janeiro. These samba schools represent various
parts of the city, and as counterpublic spheres, reproduce “local social gatherings and
neighborhood loyalties.”113 Human geographers Clare Lewis and Steve Pile contend, “In
these dynamic, multiply-layered, place-based, class-based and race-based identifications

                                                        
111
Harris, Something Within, 82.
112
Sarah Barrell, “The Big Question: How did the Rio Carnival become the biggest extravaganza in the
world?,” The Independent (London), February 20, 2009, sec. Americas,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-big-question-how-did-the-rio-carnival-become-
the-biggest-extravaganza-in-the-world-1627015.html.
113
Clare Lewis and Steve Pile, “Woman, Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance.,”
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 3, no. 1 (March 1996): 27,
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9604100529&site=ehost-live.
57 
between Samba Schools, communities and neighbourhoods, Carnival took on special
significance as it brought the slum-dwellers into the heart of the metropolitan middle-class
city.”114
In 1968, Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin published
Rabelais and His World, an analysis of celebrations in the Middle Ages that suggests that
historic celebration of ‘carnival’ is defined by a “temporary liberation from the prevailing
truth of the established order.”115 In the case of Brazilian Carnaval, the movement of the
city’s poorest people throughout dominant spheres represents a direct threat to the city’s
racial geography. Through its liberation of Rio de Janeiro, Carnaval mimics the carnivals
of “Rabelais’ World” in its “symbolic inversion of high and low values.”116 I suggest that
these high and low values are confused or subverted during Carnaval through the
manipulation of three particular social constructs: race, through the dominance of black
culture over white culture; gender, through the public display of the female body and the
designation of a Samba Queen as the most important Carnival participant; and sexuality,
through a blurring of gender norms that results in the queering of public space and the
“denaturalizing of heterosexuality.”117
The defiance of dominant discourses surrounding the “place” of blacks in Brazilian
society reaches its climax during Carnaval through the mass movement of blackness from
                                                        
114
Ibid.
115
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass:
M.I.T. Press, 1968), 10.
116
Mary Ellen Brown, Soap Opera and Women's Talk: The Pleasure of Resistance (Thousand Oaks, Calif:
Sage Publications, 1994), 150.
117
Lynda Johnston, “Borderline Bodies,” in Subjectivities, Knowledges, and Feminist Geographies: The
Subjects and Ethics of Social Research, ed. Liz Bondi, Hannah Avis, and Ruth Bankey (Lanham, Md: Rowan
& Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2002), 75.
58 
the shantytowns and economically depressed areas of Rio’s outskirts into the white zones
of Ipanema, Copacabana, and Leblon – areas that one African American interview subject
likened to a “gated community.”118 This break through of oppressed black culture
represents the publication of the hidden, and is an empowering signal to African American
tourists of the strength of fellow blacks in the diaspora to infiltrate dominant spheres. The
fact that the historically oppressed culture of black Brazilians is celebrated so openly led
one respondent to suggest that in America, this same celebration would be akin to
“everyone in the United States…making a big deal out of Black History Month.”119
It is not only conceptions of race, however, that are turned on their head during
Carnaval. Both straight and gay African American tourists who travel to Rio de Janeiro
are exposed to fluid sexual identities unlike those that are generally considered acceptable
in the United States.120 As June Jordan contends “Bisexuality invalidates either/or
formulation, either/or analysis…If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not
controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual
affirmation: To insist upon complexity, to insist upon the validity of all of the components
of social/sexual complexity.”121 The intrusion of cross-dressing, outward displays of queer
performance, and blurred heterosexual/homosexuality identities into the dominant sphere
                                                        
118
Gabrielle, telephone interview with the author. March 14, 2009.
119
Neil, telephone interview with the author. February 28, 2009.
120
Marshall C Eakin, Brazil: The Once and Future Country, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997),
144.
121
June Jordan, “A New Politics of Sexuality,” in Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State
of the Union, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 228.
59 
signify the primary ways in which sexual norms are resisted during Carnaval.122
As one advertisement suggests, “Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and drags are identities
who create, recreate, reinforce or show themselves in a remarkable way during the
Carnaval rituals.”123 These identity recreations have the potential to be transformative for
heterosexual and homosexual African Americans, who may use travel to temporarily
escape the expectations of masculinity that lead to damaging intersections of race and
sexual orientation at home.124 Due to demographics alone, African Americans are far more
likely to come into contact with a “sameness” of black and gay that they cannot so readily
find at home. These tourists may be able to use their temporary respite from a specific,
American form of homophobia to adopt a new, Brazilian politics of sexuality that, through
Carnaval inversion, challenges hegemonic masculinity and femininity.125
Perhaps most importantly, however, Carnaval and the samba dancing that defines
it are crucial to re-orientations of gender norms. Afro-Brazilian women are without a doubt
the stars of Carnaval, despite the fact that Brazil is regarded as an overtly male-dominated
society.126 The selection of Samba Queens for each float and the importance of female
bodies to the celebration of Carnaval places black females in a unique position of power to
                                                        
122
James Naylor Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil, Worlds of
desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7.
123
“The Gay Carnival Route in Rio,” http://www.carnivalservice.com/gay-carnival-route-rio.php.
124
Michael Kimmel, “Toward a Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” in Progressive Black Masculinities, ed. Athena
D Mutua (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 72.
125
Patricia Hill Collins, “A Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength, and Black Masculinities,” in
Progressive Black Masculinities, ed. Athena D Mutua (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 79.
126
Eakin, Brazil, 144.
60 
inform feminist discourses surrounding “bourgeois sexual morality”127 and a “politics of
respectability”128 driven by a Euro-American definition of womanhood.129
Lewis and Pile complicate an understanding of these discourses by offering feminist
and queer theorist Judith Butler’s post-structuralist conception of the “practices of gender
coherence”130 as a means for understanding the role of women in Carnaval celebrations.
Lewis and Pile assert, “The women who parade their bodies for the pleasure of the
spectators cannot be simply read as passive or as merely reproducing a dominant gaze
through their passivity.”131 This strand of feminism echoes Patricia Hill Collins’ history of
black women in America, a group she argues “[has] been neither the passive victims of
nor willing accomplices to their own domination.”132
Though impossible to conclude, black female travelers’ familiar history of
resistance to patriarchal subordination may allow them to identify with Afro-Brazilian
women who use their bodies in order to subvert the meaning of femininity; for “even
while these women’s bodies reinforce masculine and Brazilian values, they as individuals
are doing something rather inappropriate/d.”133 Feminist critical theorists label this
behavior a “masquerade” that hides a secret resistance to expectations of females in
                                                        
127
Richard Parker, “The Carnivalization of the World,” in The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History,
Political Economy, ed. Roger N Lancaster and Micaela Di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 371.
128
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church,
1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993).
129
C. A. Harper-Bolton, “A reconceptualization of the African American woman,” Black Male/Female
Relationships 6 (1982): 41.
130
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking gender (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 33.
131
Lewis and Pile, “Woman, Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance.,” 32.
132
Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer
1989): 747, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174683.t
133
Lewis and Pile, “Woman, Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance.,” 38.
61 
society.134
Through a shared knowledge of resistance tactics such as the performance of the
masquerade, a global black female community may be able to enrich an “Afrocentric
feminist epistemology.”135 I posit that tourism and diasporic engagement is one way in
which black women around the world can contribute to the construction of uniquely
feminist hidden transcripts and an embrace of a Black Feminist pedagogy.136
Though none of my respondents traveled to Brazil during Carnaval, bloggers and
journalists speak to the distinctive strength they see in African American women outside
of the Carnaval parades. Salim Washington, who visited Bahia in the run-up to Carnaval,
describes the gender relations in a dance hall as vastly different from those he experienced
in other parts of Latin America. “In the dance styles of some Latin dancing…you have the
man at the center of the couple’s dancing space, controlling the dance…there was nothing
analogous evident in the dancing here. This music was a revelation, as they say.”137 The
revelatory nature of African Americans' observation of Afro-Brazilian women is echoed in
the travelogue of Evelyn C. White, who declared in an Essence article:
I am struck by the regal bearing with which Afro-Brazilians carry

themselves. From grimy street children hawking candy to Rosalia de
Oliveira, the country’s first Black woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry,
they all hold their heads high, as if daring anyone to challenge their
magnificence. This comes as a revelation to me – an African American
                                                        
134
Butler, Gender Trouble, 68; Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and
Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2.
135
Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” 755.
136
Gloria Joseph, “Black Feminist Pedagogy and Schooling in Capitalist White America,” in Words of Fire:
An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press,
1995), 462-471.
137
Salim Washington, “notes from bahia, pre-carnaval,” Notes from Abroad, January 30, 2008,
http://www.salimwashington.com/blog/?p=1.
62 
woman whose self-esteem during our own Black Power movement was as
much battered by the Blacks who attacked Shirley Chisholm’s beauty when
she ran for president in 1972 as it was by the Whites who murdered
Emmett Till.138
White’s encounter with what she claims is an innate magnificence and dignity of
Afro-Brazilian women empowers and re-orients her understanding of black womanhood.
By drawing strength from this form of Pan-African Black Feminism, White begins to hint
at an ideology construction that Black Feminists claim is too difficult to reconcile.139
Capoeira
In almost every square and public space throughout Salvador and other cities in
Brazil, men and women, young and old can be found playing Capoeira, a style of “dance”
created by Brazilian slaves to disguise the training of martial arts skills they hoped to
employ in revolts against their master. Despite no longer a necessary form of physical
resistance, Capoeira has transformed itself into a form of cultural resistance that is widely
practiced by Afro-Brazilians living throughout Bahia. In its contemporary form, Capoeira
is more than just a performance for the streams of tourists – instead, it is the physical and
artistic manifestation of a way of life employed by Afro-Brazilians to resist the norms
prescribed by the dominant sphere. The Capoeira master, Mestre Reposa, explains:
I love Capoeira because it is life in miniature. It is living. It is a philosophy

for living. We are all capoeiristas at heart. The problem is that most people
don’t know it, so they go around trying to act according to how the rules of
proper politics, business, and everyday conduct tell them. Capoeira can’t be
                                                        
138
Evelyn C. White, “Black pride, Brazilian style,” Essence, February 1998,
139
Dawson, Black Visions, 152.
63 
rationalized; it can’t be reduced to a lot of rules and sequences of moves like

a robot. Hell, a bunch of capoeiristas drinking beer and telling jokes in a bar
can be at the same time practicing Capoeira.140
Reposa’s understanding of Capoeira as a philosophy of life represents the ways in
which the Afro-Brazilian community has historically relied on their unique cultural forms
as sources for ideology construction. Reposa’s rejection of “the rules of proper politics” is
manifested in his practice of Capoeira. For Reposa and other capoeiristas, their
performances symbolize opposition to the Afro-Brazilian way of life that the hegemonic
sphere attempts to impose. Because Capoeira is no longer an underground movement in
Brazil, the graceful lines of physically fit capoeiristas can be spotted on almost every street
corner in Salvador, offering a public display of a historic resistance movement.
One African American respondent named Vince, a middle-aged financier from
Florida, argued that the emergence of Capoeira out of hiding and into the public sphere is
somehow, inherently different from the African American cultural forms that many claim
are equally resistant in the United States. Vince explained, “These things [Capoeira and
other forms of Afro-Brazilian cultural expression]…they are more than jazz. It’s a physical
way out, but it’s also a mental or spiritual way out. It’s not something you can just listen
to and you’ll feel better about yourself or sorry for yourself. Its something you watch that
makes you feel angry and energized.”141 When I questioned Vince on the ambiguity of the
word “out”, he explained, “Out like Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus’ ‘out’.” Though I had heard
the song before, it took a re-listening to understand how Vince envisioned Capoeira:
                                                        
140
Floyd Merrell, Capoeira and Candomblé: Conformity and Resistance in Brazil, 1st ed. (Princeton, NJ:
Markus Wiener Publishers, 200), 19-20.
141
64 
Exodus: Movement of Jah people! Oh, yeah!

Yeah-yeah-yeah, well!
Uh! Open your eyes and look within:
Are you satisfied (with the life you’re living)? Uh!
Move! move! move! move! move! move!142
This call for figurative and physical movement within the black community is
echoed by Mestre Nestor Capoeira, who claims that though African Americans may have
made material gains through their struggles in the United States, they have much to learn
from Salvador’s capoeiristas:
Capoeira can be a tool in the First World, a tool against the forces that tend
to turn people into robots that do not think, do not wish, do not have any
fantasies, ideals, imagination or creativity; a tool against a civilization that
increasingly says one simply has to work and then go home and sit in front
of a TV with a can of beer in hand, like a pig being fattened for the
slaughter.143
Nestor’s advice to the First World is particularly apt for those black Americans
who may enjoy the luxuries of the middle class, but who feel disconnected from the rest of
the black community and dismayed by the ways in which the fruits of the “American
Dream” have failed to satisfy them. For Vince, the Capoeira philosophy led to a new
framework for understanding political participation. Rather than rely on traditional politics
to serve his interests, Vince adopted Capoeira’s reliance on personal strength as a means
for liberation and political resistance. He explains, “I don’t vote because I don’t view the
system as offering me any real choice, so I therefore am not going to participate. The
ability to be outside America has opened up the opportunity for me to be quite comfortable
or less dependent upon the American political concept as being central to my intellectual
                                                        
142
Bob Marley, Exodus, CD, Exodus (Island Records, 1977).
143
Nestor Capoeira, The Little Capoeira Book, Rev. ed. (Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 2003), 37.
65 
or emotional or spiritual wellbeing. I felt the opposite. I feel less constrained or boxed in
by its terms and conditions.”144 The ability of Capoeira, a Third World, Brazilian form of
black power to infiltrate the ideological frameworks of African American travelers speaks
to the cross-directional discourses that result from counterpublic collisions abroad.
Classes by some of the city’s greatest mestres, or masters of Capoeira, draw in
African American tourists everyday, promising to provide travelers with “camaraderie and
competitiveness” and “a great way to connect with fellow followers of Capoeira from
around the globe.”145 While black tourists may only intend to study Capoeira for a
physical work out, the result of their engagement often ends up offering them an intimate
study of a mastered form of black resistance. As political scientist Robert E. Lane argues,
“Men who have feelings of mastery and are endowed with ego strength tend to generalize
these sentiments” in the political realm.146 As students of Capoeira, African American
tourists are connected not only to a resistant, Afro-Brazilian counterpublic, but are also
accorded a sense of respect and self esteem that, according to Lane, may lend itself to
increased feelings of political efficacy, defined as an individual’s belief in their ability
influence political affairs.147
Vince’s decision not to participate in the formal political system reflects the radical
ways in which this increased political efficacy may take shape. For Vince, the
counterpublic collisions he experienced in Brazil provided him with evidence of the ways
                                                        
144
145
“Samba Capoeira,” Salvador Samba, 2006, http://www.salvadorsamba.com/samba-capoeira.html.
146
Robert Edwards Lane, Political Life: Why People Get Involved in Politics (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959),
149.
147
Campbell et al., The American Voter, 187.
66 
in which cultural resistance has the potential to influence African American politics outside
the confines of a restraining, white-dominated political system. This antithetical strategy
of political participation reflects one dogma of Black Nationalism that preaches
nonelectoral strategies and a separation of the black movement from white controlled
political spheres.148
Even if tourists do not take Capoeira lessons, most are guaranteed some exposure
to this vital element of Afro-Brazilian culture, as less spontaneous and more staged
displays of Capoeira are a part of almost every group travel itinerary. Though these
tourists may not participate in Capoeira directly, their observation and understanding of
Capoeira as a site of resistance is equally influential. Described in tourism literature as a
“graceful yet deadly dance,”149 it is clear to most tourists that what is being performed for
the audience masks a hidden and deeper meaning of resistance that harks back to the slave
era.
In Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and The Black Working Class, political scientist
Robin Kelly argues that cultural expression has the ability to empower blacks in unique
ways: “Intellectuals and political leaders who continue to see empowerment solely in
terms of ‘black’ control over political and economic institutions,” fail to understand the
“capacity for cultural politics…to both contest dominant meanings ascribed to their
experiences and seize spaces for leisure, pleasure, and recuperation.”150 I argue that
                                                        
148
Dawson, Black Visions, 109-110.
149
“Samba Capoeira.”
150
Robin D. G Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press,
1994), 180.
67 
through a diasporic engagement with Capoeira, African American tourists are provided
with a model of black resistance that requires both physical, mental, and spiritual
awareness. African Americans such as Vince who travel to Salvador are overwhelmed by
the ability of Afro-Brazilians to seize the city’s most public spaces and see this form of
resistance as an alternative to the African American ideologies that encourage a more
overtly political mode of opposition at home. This control of urban space and positioning
of black culture into the public sphere is at the heart of what James Jennings labels “black
empowerment activism.”151
African American tourists frequently comment on the ways in which they feel
empowered by their global black brothers and sisters who have achieved a certain level of
emancipation not felt in the United States. I suggest that African Americans see the
emergence of blackness from the dark corners of society and into the public sphere as
integral to “[restoring] a sense of respect and personhood,”152 to members of black
communities. Capoeira confirms what Kelley claims is a capacity for cultural politics, and
provides a model for African Americans of the ways in which suppressed blacks are using
their distinct black cultures and religions to speak truth to power throughout the diaspora.
Favela Tourism
In 1992, Marcelo Armstrong began organizing tours into the favelas of Rio de
Janeiro – exposing to foreign tourists the inner workings of the hill-side slum towns made
                                                        
151
James Jennings, The Politics of Black Empowerment: The Transformation of Black Activism in Urban
America, African American life series (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 77.
152
68 
famous over thirty years earlier by the French film Black Orpheus. Drums, samba,
Carnival, and a spirit and energy of blackness defined the favelas of Camus' Black Orpheus
and catapulted an exceptionally sensory image of Brazil into the minds of Americans.153
Yet this stereotypical rendering of blackness left some viewers uneasy with a romantic
portrayal of life in a Third World slum. In Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
describes the embarrassment he feels when he realizes his white mother has
unquestioningly accepted the film’s exoticization of black poverty. Obama explains, “The
storyline was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the
favelas of Rio during carnival, in Technicolor splendour, set against scenic green hills, the
black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in
colourful plumage.”154
In an attempt to challenge this enchanting image, Marcelo Armstrong offers
contemporary travelers a sensory overload of an entirely different variety, revealing to the
tourist an underbelly of Rio de Janeiro that replaces the smiling faces and dancing bodies
of Black Orpheus with insights into the structural causes of the crime, poverty, and
corruption of City of God.
In its simple definition, a favela is “a residential area inhabited by poor and
working-class people, the majority of whom are black.”155 While favelas are distinguished
from the rest of Rio de Janeiro due to their unique demographic and racial make-up alone,
                                                        
153
Marcel Camus, Black Orpheus, DVD (GAGA Communications, 1959).
154
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, 1st ed. (New York: Times
Books, 1995), 123.
155
Joao Costa Vargas, “The Inner City and the Favela: Transnational Black Politics,” Race Class 44, no. 4
(2003): 20, http://rac.sagepub.com.
69 
there are additional characteristics of favela communities that relegate them to
marginalized spaces and spheres. Vargas asserts, “In spite of their heterogeneity, all
favelas have in common the fact that most of their residents have historically been
excluded from the formal labour market, quality education, and participation in the public
and political spheres.”156
These elements of the Brazilian underclass’ social geography and segregation from
the dominant sphere contribute to a reputation of favelas in Brazil that mimics the
stereotyping of black ghettoes in the United States. French sociologist Loïc Wacquant
explains how the impoverished communities of both the United States and Brazil are
regarded “as the ‘lawless zones’, the ‘problem estates’, the ‘no-go areas’ or the ‘wild
districts’ of the city, territories of deprivation and dereliction to be feared, fled from, and
shunned because they are – or such is their reputation but, in these matters, perception
contributes powerfully to fabricating reality – hotbeds of violence, vice, and social
dissolution.”157
These shared reputations lead to a social marginalization of the favelados, or favela
residents, that parallels the marginalization of blacks living in the ghettoes of urban centers
across the United States. With a knowledge of these similarities, I focused my study of
favela tourism in Brazil on a hypothesis which suggested that the similar circumstances
facing blacks in both countries would contribute to the development of counterpublic
discourses centering on a shared understanding of universal black suffering and a rejection
                                                        
156
Ibid.
157
Loic J. D. Wacquant and John Howe, “Ghetto, Banlieue, Favela, et caetera: Tools for Rethinking Urban
Marginality,” in Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity), 1.
70 
of the dominant sphere’s simplistic understanding of black humanity. Yet in the process of
investigating African American travel to Rio de Janeiro, I uncovered an aspect of black
travel patterns that suggests African Americans may avoid these counterpublic collisions
in an attempt to preserve the strength and hope they intend to acquire through
interactions with Afro-Brazilians who have already overcome the type of oppression they
seek to escape in the United States.
In “Favelas and Ghettoes: Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City,”
Brazilian urban planner Ney dos Santos Oliveira examines the history of slavery and the
evolution of black life in Rio de Janeiro and New York, positing that the creation of
segregated black public spaces resulted from similar racist processes in Brazil and the
United States. Oliveira argues that despite definitive differences in the histories of black
populations in the U.S. and Brazil, underclass location patterns and a trend of race-based
political action can be identified in both sites.158 From this privileged socio-scientific
standpoint, the ghettoes that lay on the outskirts of America’s greatest cities and the
favelas that look down upon Rio de Janeiro’s most beautiful beaches are difficult to
distinguish. Yet whereas a traveler to New York or Los Angeles could easily enjoy the
sites of the city without any exposure to its less polished neighborhoods, the geography of
Rio de Janeiro prohibits even the most naïve traveler from avoiding a consciousness of the
favelas’ existence. This consciousness forces African American tourists to make deliberate
decisions on whether they wish to engage with troubling dimensions of Afro-Brazilian life.
                                                        
158
Ney dos Santos Oliveira, “Favelas and Ghettos: Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City,”
Latin American Perspectives 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 71-89, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634130.
71 
On the way from Rio de Janeiro’s main airport to the tourist zones of Ipanema,
Copacabana, and Leblon, travelers must pass one of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous and
visually disturbing settlements, Complexo da Maré. The incidence of death in this
particular favela has earned it a reputation among residents of Rio de Janeiro as the city’s
own Faixa de Gaza or Gaza Strip.159 Complexo’s expansive, low-rise architecture allows
the international tourist to take on the ultimate tourist gaze: looking through a taxi
window into what one journalist dubbed, “a labyrinthine network of slums.”160
This immediate and forced visual interaction with Brazil’s ultimate black
counterpublic space has the potential to be particularly troubling for African American
tourists who are seeking to escape the painful racial reality of the United States through
travel to a destination that they perceive to be an emancipated space. While the allure of
Brazil may be different for each traveler, evidence from market research, travel narratives
and interview subjects suggests that African Americans are traveling to Brazil for an
engagement with space characterized not only by a racial paradise that offers an alternate
conception of blackness in Afro-Brazilian culture (through Capoeira, Candomblé, and
Carnival), but also through engagement with an actual paradise characterized by
relaxation on beautiful beaches, delicious and exotic food, and sometimes sexual
                                                        
159
Tom Phillips, “Shantytown clearance: More than a million of Brazil's poor targeted in an attempt to
'clean up' the city: Blood, sweat and fears in favelas of Rio,” The Guardian (London), October 29, 2005,
Final edition, sec. World news, http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/frame.do?tokenKey=rsh-
20.941444.9189539023&target=results_listview_resultsNav&reloadEntirePage=true&rand=123715418082
8&returnToKey=20_T6042131671&parent=docview.
160
Tom Phillips, “Justice for One. In Brazil, Drug War Goes On.,” Brazzil, June 3, 2005,
http://www.brazzil.com/2005-mainmenu-79/152-june-2005/9297.html.
72 
relationships with women.161 For African Americans traveling to Brazil, however, the
expectation of a “racial paradise” can be complicated by even the most cursory glance at
the racial makeup of Rio’s favelas, which are 60% black despite the fact that blacks
represent only 30% of the city’s population.162
In his collection of travel narratives, African American Reflections on Brazil’s
Racial Paradise, Hellwig weaves a historical record of black social thought that contends
there has been an evolution from the original belief of African Americans’ that Brazil is a
racial paradise, to a debate over whether this paradise was real, to a contemporary
rejection of the “myth” of Brazil as an emancipated space. Hellwig argues:
The despair of African Americans living in the first decades of the century, a
period one historian has referred to as the nadir of the Negro, contributed to
the affirmation of the myth of the racial paradise. With its absence of racial
violence and legal segregation, Brazil represented a clearly superior
alternative to America’s pattern of racial violence and racial paradise. The
Great Migration out of the rural south, World War II, the rise of anti-
colonial movements, and the civil rights movement served to undermine Jim
Crow, raise aspirations, and foster race consciousness; they also stimulated
a reassessment of Brazil at mid-century. The subsequent decline of the civil
rights movement, the reassertion of black Nationalism, and the growing
awareness of the role of class-related factors in perpetuating the subordinate
status of people of color in the United States have strongly influenced
African Americans’ rejection of the idealized image of Brazil since the mid-
1960s.163
Evidence from travel narratives from the past fifty years as well as musings on race
relations in Brazil by my respondents, however, suggests that this rejection is far from
                                                        
161
Edward M. Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black
Diaspora,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2, New Series (June 1996): 290-304,
162
Abdias do Nascimento, Brazil, Mixture or Massacre?: Essays in the Genocide of a Black People, trans. Elisa
Larkin Nascimento, 2nd ed. (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1989).
163
David J Hellwig, ed., African-American Reflections on Brazil's Racial Paradise (Philadelphia: Temple
73 
universal among black Americans who encounter Brazil directly. I posit that Hellwig’s
suggestion that the “racial paradise” myth has been shattered may simply represent the
elite opinion of the scholars and writers he selected for his compilation rather than the
opinions of everyday tourists such as those I consulted.
Vince, the middle-aged financier from Florida, willingly acknowledged the
problems that face Brazil and other diasporic locations but maintained their importance as
emancipated spaces relative to the United States. Vince explained, “I’m not saying that
[majority black countries] are paradises. But I think the specific, overall ingredient is the
lesser presence of that stuff in the atmosphere – whether we want to call it racism,
superiority, hypocrisy, fake spirituality, pure evil…the lesser presence of all of that on the
organized level of society makes those places a little less jarring on my soul.”164
Vince’s understanding of Brazil as a less “evil” space reflects his own belief that
America is a society in which much hope is lost. Another black traveler’s amazement with
the ways in which black Brazilians were “living and thriving”165 in contemporary Brazil
exemplifies the view of many black travelers who admire the achievements of Brazilians
who they see as equal to themselves in terms of generational distance from Africa, but
more successful than themselves in successfully resisting the subjugation of white
hegemonic powers. The existence of blacks in diasporic communities who are perceived to
be “living and thriving” despite racial barriers to progress similar to those in the United
States bolster travelers beliefs in the power of self-determination. These reactions to race
                                                        
164
165
de Santana Pinho, “African-American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” 77.
74 
relations in Brazil challenge Hellwig’s assertion that African Americans have finally and
completely rejected Brazil as a racial paradise, and suggest that black travelers’
interactions in Brazil provide them with a framework for building their own resistant
ideologies.
While it is possible that African American travelers arrive at conclusions on race in
Brazil through a thorough investigation of Brazilian society, evidence from travel
itineraries and narratives suggests that the ability of black travelers’ to enjoy Brazil as an
emancipated space despite the existence of glaring racial inequalities is the result of a
deliberate mode of travel that seeks to sustain a sense of racial solidarity through an
avoidance of certain troubling spaces. My evidence suggests that within diaspora locations
– spaced perceived by African American travelers to be emancipated – exist subspaces that
can be either empowering or problematizing and that cause different reactions and
questions to emerge among black travelers.
The favela as a tourist destination, then, marks a problematized space that
complicates African American tourists’ conceptions of black power in Brazil. As a result,
African Americans attempt to circumvent those spaces so as to evade engagement with the
strands of Brazilian society that are incongruous to their expectations and desires of a
successful and resistant black counterpublic. For African Americans, transnationalism is a
positive force that unites the subjugated black citizens of the world in challenging
dominant white discourses. While African Americans embrace travel to spaces that expose
them to resistance strategies such as Candomblé and Capoeira, tour guides in Rio de
75 
Janeiro are quick to point out that African Americans seeking to engage with favela
residents are rare.
Marcelo Armstrong, the tour guide who brought tourism into favela communities,
is well known in Rio de Janeiro’s tourism industry as a figure committed to changing the
perception of the favelas as a home to the city’s most degraded residents. In his brochure
that can be found at almost every tourist-class hotel and hostel, Armstrong describes the
favelas as, “Picturesque from a distance…[but] once closer they reveal their complex
architecture, developing commerce and friendly people. Most Samba Schools participating
in the Carnival parade come from favelas. The tour changes their reputation of areas
related only to violence and poverty.” Ironically, the reputation of favelas as sites of “evil
and danger” mimics the reputation that has plagued America’s ghettoes and has prohibited
the dominant sphere from understanding the contours of marginalized peoples’ everyday
lives.166
Despite Armstrong’s commitment to re-orienting tourists’ understandings of favela
life, he admitted that few African Americans have joined his tour in hopes of seeing this
less glamorous side of Rio de Janeiro. African Americans, he suggested, tend to stay in
Bahia, where interactions with blackness involve an engagement with black beauty and
culture, or within the confines of Copacabana, where interactions with blackness rarely
exist.167 Another tour guide who took me on a cultural heritage tour of the city believes
that black travelers to Rio de Janeiro do not arrive with the same set of expectations for
                                                        
166
Larry Ford and Ernst Griffin, “The Ghettoization of Paradise,” Geographical Review 69, no. 2 (April
1979): 140, http://www.jstor.org/stable/214961.
167
Marcelo Armstrong, interview with the author. January 19, 2009. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
76 
cultural engagement that they bring to Salvador. As a result, she argues, they do not seek
out black spaces and depart from the city with a limited knowledge of its historic and
continued modes of resistance.168 A review of group travel literature confirms the tour
guides’ suspicions, as none of the itineraries I consulted make any mention of traveling
into the hillsides where the favelados create their own counterpublic spaces that resist the
kind of “despotism of drug dealers and state-sanctioned brutality exercised by the
police,”169 that also exists in poor black communities.
In “Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics
of Language,” Roth-Gordon highlights the potential for black counterpublic collisions in
the favela communities that African Americans avoid. As an American ethnographer
entering spaces of counterpublic discourse in Rio’s favelas, Roth-Gordon describes the
enthusiasm with which her respondents attempted to engage in discussions on the
similarities between urban African Americans and Afro-Brazilian favelados. Roth-Gordon
argues that the black Brazilian youth who understand American society through their
engagement with American hip-hop, “seek to empower themselves through the
confrontational stance they associate with U.S. racialized urban spaces.”170 The Afro-
Brazilian desire to create transnational, oppositional discourses, however, is stymied due
to the reluctance of black American travelers to engage with sites that derail their intended
goals of self-empowerment. Because the favelas fail to offer discourses with a successful,
                                                        
168
Lisa Schnittger, interview with the author. January 21, 2009. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
169
Vargas, “The Inner City and the Favela: Transnational Black Politics,” 19.
170
Jennifer Roth-Gordon, “Conversational Sampling, Race Trafficking, and the Invocation of the Gueto in
Brazilian Hip Hop,” in Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of
Language, ed. H. Sam Alim, Awa Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 66.
77 
resistant global black community that has retained African culture and overcome elements
of white oppression, African Americans look elsewhere during their time abroad.
Gabrielle, a 37 year-old executive assistant from New York, was the sole
respondent who had ventured into a favela through an organized tour in Rio de Janeiro.
While her reaction to the poverty and conditions of Brazil was typical of all travelers who
venture into Rocinha, Rio’s largest slum, Gabrielle did not mention any sort of
connectivity with the people or space in the way she did about places such as the terreiros
where Capoeira artists perform or the beaches where Brazilians of all races seamlessly mix.
Gabrielle offered simply that she “had seen extremely poor before,” through her travels to
India and other third world countries.171 The fact that the manifestation of poverty she
witnessed in Rocinha existed in a definitively black space did not seem to be an aspect of
her travel she wished to focus on in our interview.
An avoidance of this topic reveals insight into the ways in which blacks may avoid
topics that challenge their ideologies. In Gabrielle’s instance, the blackness of the favela
may have forced her to question her understanding of the significance of race as a social
determinant. As a traveler hoping to find evidence that race has not held back the progress
of Afro-Brazilians, the poverty of the favelas may have served as evidence to her of the
ways in which “blackness constrains life chances.”172 As Harris-Lacewell explains,
African Americans do not accept an ideological perspective simply because

they are exposed to it. The process of ideological development is more
complex. These subjects bring with them to the political discussion a set of
beliefs and attitudes already informed by their prior experience with the
                                                        
171
Gabrielle, telephone interview with the author. March 14, 2009.
172
78 
political and racial world. They are resistant to messages that offend their
fundamental notions of how the world works.173
Gabrielle, a black woman who has achieved great personal and financial success at
one of America’s most vaunted financial institutions, may have hoped to find in Brazil a
confirmation of her belief in the ability of black power and self-determined progress to
triumph over racist institutions throughout the diaspora. While she subsequently found
this confirmation in Salvador de Bahia, her avoidance of an exhaustive engagement with
less successful Afro-Brazilians in the favelas suggests she may have resisted aspects of
Brazilian society that challenged her beliefs about race as a global determinant of life
chances.
Despite the importance of favela communities to the sustainment of the Capoeira
and Candomblé culture that African Americans often describe as the highlight of their trip
to Brazil, the fear of a challenge to one’s pre-established ideology and the acceptance of the
dominant public discourse surrounding favelas keeps blacks such as Gabrielle from
engaging with this particularly impoverished and alienated counterpublic beyond a surface
level. Maya Angelou’s description of her discussions with fellow black travelers in Ghana
lends evidence to this pattern of African Americans evading problematizing discourses
during their time abroad: “We did not discuss the open gutters along the streets of Accra,
the shacks of corrugated iron in certain neighborhoods, dirty beaches and voracious
mosquitoes…We had come home, and if home was not what we had expected, never
                                                        
173
Ibid., 152.
79 
mind, our need for belonging allowed us to ignore the obvious and to create real places or
even illusory places, befitting our imagination.”174
This rejection of a diasporic engagement with a black counterpublic is
representative of the ways in which African Americans travel to Brazil in hopes of escaping
the troubles they may face at home in a quest for positive black identity affirmation or
empowerment. The purpose of this section on favela tours is to suggest the ways in which
African Americans miss potential opportunities for transnational black ideology
convergence due to the existence of these opportunities in troubling or complicating
spaces. This section further helps to classify the types of experiences black travelers seek
and avoid as they employ travel in a search for a sameness and solidarity that can confirm
their beliefs, strengthen their ideologies, and endow them with “a definition of the good
and a vision for the future,” as well as “some prescriptions for achieving it.”175
One possible explanation for the lack of African American tourists to favela
communities might be due to the relative “otherness” that the favelados represent. As I
have argued, in a departure from the typical tourist path, African Americans may travel to
Brazil and other diaspora locations in a quest to find “sameness” rather than the Other.
Because of the background of the black travelers who can afford the expenses of a trip to
Brazil, it is possible that they do not identify with the young black residents of the
communidades that surround Rio de Janeiro’s more posh environs. My research,
however, provides evidence that expands this explanation into a theory of the ways in
                                                        
174
Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 19.
175
80 
which diaspora travel motivations and choices are linked to black travelers’ specific desire
to affirm their political ideologies through engagement with emancipated black spaces and
peoples.
A recurring theme in black travel narratives is a discomfort that results when
tourist experiences in diaspora locations fail to strengthen the traveler’s sense of racial
consciousness and black pride. African Americans who are troubled by their visits to the
West Coast of Africa, for example, often cite as the source of their discomfort the stark
realization that Africans reject the brotherhood and sisterhood they seek. Black travelers
who engage in leisure travel to the Caribbean are often concerned with their sudden
participation in a global hierarchy of blacks that involuntarily positions them into a
dominant sphere. The decision to avoid favelas and the reactions that black travelers have
to these other, problematizing spaces suggest that black Americans have preconceived
expectations of the ways in which they can and should connect with the blacks they
encounter during diaspora travel. Often times, however, African American travelers find
the terms or grounds of such connections to be troublesome.
Though I maintain that black travelers represent a vast spectrum of political
ideologies, the trends that exist among black travelers in the diaspora show a desire to
heighten or endorse a form of “black empowerment politics.”176 These travelers look to a
positive affirmation of the existence of successfully resistant black counterpublics abroad
and make a “[pledge] to the establishment of African cultural dominance within individual
                                                        
176
Jennings, The Politics of Black Empowerment.
81 
communities.”177 Because black Americans traveling abroad are often successful
themselves, it may be difficult for them to see the favela communities that so closely mimic
American ghettoes as successfully emancipated counterpublic spaces. Instead, black
Americans look for diasporic counterpublic spaces that can indelibly link them to a shared,
assertive, dominating black culture and provide them with a primary source for liberatory
ideas that they can engage with while abroad and subsequently transport home. These
discursive spaces enable black travelers to better understand the ways in which black
Brazilians employ cultural pride and solidarity as a means for self-determination and
political and psychological emancipation.
My research suggests that while African Americans travel with a belief in the Black
Diaspora’s “connective marginalities,”178 these connections are often either disputed by
the blacks they encounter, as I will suggest is the case in Ghana, or are based on
marginalities too vast for the black travelers to find a sense of commonality, as I have
argued is the case in Brazil. Black avoidance of favelas provides useful insight into the
ways in which blacks avoid spaces that they do not believe valuable, liberatory
counterpublic collisions can occur. This avoidance suggests that the counterpublic
collisions that African Americans experience while traveling abroad are not entirely
accidental, but can be manipulated by the travelers’ own desire to be a recipient or student
of black liberatory discourses versus an active agent in transmitting black American
                                                        
177
Robert Starks, “Million Man March Manifesto,” Manuscript (Northeastern Illinois University, 1995).
178
Halifu Osumare, “Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe,”
Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24, no. 1-2 (2001): 171-181, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1537-
4726.2001.2401_171.x.as
82 
resistance narratives to diasporic communities abroad. As a result, the collisions that
African American travelers seek are not usually found in spaces bound up in troubling
conceptions of blackness but are instead found in spaces that lend themselves to
conversations surrounding themes of brotherhood, universal resistance, and black cultural
and political liberation.
Conclusion
When African Americans travel to diaspora locations, they are in pursuit of an
emancipated space that retains African culture and provides the safety and comfort of a
majority black community. Yet within these spaces as a whole exist subspaces that I label
either empowering or problematizing. African Americans travel to empowering subspaces
in order to learn political and cultural strategies from their black counterparts in the
diaspora. Often times, African American travelers look to empowering spaces such as the
terreiros of Salvador simply to strengthen the ideologies they set out with, adding a global
dimension to their previously provincial one. Other times, these empowering spaces
expose them to radical, counter-hegemonic displays that can alter their identity and
ideology.
On the contrary, when African Americans travel to spaces outside these
empowering zones and into problematizing subspaces, their experiences may undermine
the black empowerment agenda they set out to affirm and result in a crisis surrounding
their identity as global black citizens and Pan-African participants. While black diaspora
83 
travelers often elude these interactions through avoidance of subspaces such as the favelas
of Rio de Janeiro, many times their interactions can be unexpected, as we will see in
descriptions of travelers’ disappointments with their experiences in Africa.
Though tourism theorists may question whether this type of deliberate travel
provides an “authentic” experience, a preoccupation with the authenticity of travel takes
us too far afield from an investigation into how the spaces black travelers choose to engage
are the result of a conscious decision to find experiences (authentic or not) that can
embolden their politically resistant and often-times Cultural Nationalist discourses.
William L. Van De Burg, a leading scholar of Black Nationalism, explains:
Cultural nationalists held that their unique literary, artistic, and musical
creations reflected a special consciousness. Neither European nor African,
the black aesthetic was said to be Afro-Americans’ most important natural
resource – the essence of their collective psyche. In this conceptualization,
black culture was Black Power. Organically connected to the lives and
traditions of black people, its vitality and grandeur challenged white
cultural particularism and invalidated claims of Euro-American
superiority…Diverse in format and manner of presentation, black cultural
expression promoted racial unity, encouraged self-actualization, and
facilitated the transmission of revolutionary messages to all manner of Afro-
Americans.179
African American travelers’ repeated collisions with counterpublic cultures
underscores the importance of Brazil as a source of contemporary Black Nationalist
ideology. Capoeira, Candomblé, and Carnaval thus afford black travelers – who often come
from an alienated middle class that feels shut out from the American Dream – the
                                                        
179
William L Van De Burg, “Black Art and Black Nationalism,” in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus
Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William L Van De Burg (New York: New York University Press, 1997),
215.
84 
opportunity to engage with a diasporic counterpublic that strengthens their sense of
personal and political efficacy through an increased sense of racial consciousness.
The subspaces of Brazil, both empowering and problematizing, are significant
contributors to ideology formation among African American travelers. African American
tourists in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro universally describe their experiences as globally
contextualizing. These travelers, through diasporic engagement and transient discourses,
become conscious of their African American struggles in the context of their Afro-Brazilian
counterparts. When their experiences are empowering, black travelers comment on the
abilities of Afro-Brazilians to resist dominant sphere oppression and hope to learn from
their strategies. When their experiences are problematizing, they either avoid the
situations all together, or must reconsider their ideologies in a global context. Brazil thus
acts as an important contributor to the reconsideration of black identity, and, in turn,
political ideology.
85 
 
Chapter Three
Mother Homeland?
Rage, Redemption,
Celebration and Double Alienation in Ghana
I have just come back from a journey in the world of nearly five months…I have seen a black
president inaugurated. I have walked in the African big bush and heard the night cry of leopards.
I have traded in African markets, talked with African chiefs and been the guest of white
governors. I have seen the Alhambra and the great mosque at Cordova and lunched with H.G.
Wells; and I am full, very full with things that must be said.
– W.E.B. Du Bois, African Diary (1924)
I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me.
– Richard Wright, Black Power (1954)
Background
D
espite the rise of African American heritage tourism to Brazil, it is Africa
that has historically been revered in black communities as a mother
homeland, calling out for the return of its sons and daughters. As a result of the
continent’s mythic history, African Americans who plan to vacation abroad often put
Africa at the top of their destination wish list, with over 71% of potential black travelers
86 
Chapter Three: Mother Homeland? Rage, Redemption, Celebration and Double Alienation in Ghana
listing countries within the continent as the places they would most like to travel.180
Researchers suggest that the significant rise in African American tourism to Africa began
in the late 1970s, a period in African American history that gave rise to calls for
Afrocentrism by activists such as Ron Karenga.181 This trend aligned closely with the
publication and subsequent television serialization of the wildly successful Alex Haley
novel, Roots. Haley’s novel suggested to African Americans in the post-civil Rights era the
relevance of both Africa and the slave trade to their contemporary identities, and
“contributed to a narrative shift from what was popularly represented in schools as black
Americans being victims of slavery who were saved by Abraham Lincoln, to blacks as
noble survivors and agents of their own freedom.”182
Anthropologist Bayo Holsey argues that from within this new, empowering
framework for understanding their history, African Americans set off to Africa, and Ghana
in particular, in search of spaces in which to mourn their troubled past and celebrate their
triumphant return.183 Ghana’s distinction as the best place to enact this ritual is likely the
result of its status as both an English-speaking country and the home to two of the more
grand heritage sites that speckle Africa’s coastline: Elmina and Cape Coast Castles.184 A
commitment on the part of Ghana’s government and tourism board to increase African
                                                        
180
Jonathan N. Goodrich, “Black American Tourists: Some Research Findings,” Journal of Travel Research
24, no. 2 (October 1, 1985): 27, http://jtr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/2/27.
181
Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism
(New York: New York University Press, 2003), 129.
182
Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational
Communities (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press), 140-141.
183
Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), 155.
184
Some African American tourists have pushed to rename Ghana’s slave sites as “Dungeons” instead of
“Castles.” For the sake of clarity, however, I will refer to Elmina and Cape Coast by their official
designations.
87 
American tourists awareness of Ghana as the site of over half of the sixty most active slave
sites 185 has further strengthened the country’s position as the presumed homeland for
African American tourists.186 The creation of a Ministry of Tourism in 1993 and
subsequent tourism visitor and revenue growth rates of 16% to 30% per annum are
evidence of the ways in which Ghana’s strategies for increasing tourism are working.187
Further proof of Ghana’s specific role as a vital space in which to contend with
black identity is found in the writings of some of the African American communities’ most
prolific intellectuals, who have documented their journeys to Ghana since the turn of the
twentieth century. I engage their texts with caution, not because I do not value their
contributions to this discourse, but because most of them cannot be labeled mere tourists,
but instead émigrés or journalists who lived throughout the continent for extended periods
of time.
As a result of their prolonged engagement with Africa, many intellectuals produced
narratives that detail transformative experiences in sites that the casual black tourist rarely
has the opportunity to fully engage with given the short length of their travel and their
closely followed itinerary. Given this paper’s focus on the experiences of everyday
travelers, who typically spend only a short period of time in Ghana and follow an itinerary
restricted to spaces chosen by travel agencies, the writings of intellectuals such as Richard
                                                        
185
Pure African Gold to form part of the Museum's Foundation, Press release (Baltimore, MD: The Reginald
F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture),
www.africanamericanculture.org/Ghananian%20Foundation%20Celebr.pdf.
186
Bayo Holsey, “Transatlantic Dreaming: Slavery, Tourism, and Diasporic Encounters,” in Homecomings:
Unsettling Paths of Return, ed. Fran Markowitz and Anders H Stefansson, Program in migration and
refugee studies (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2004), 168.
187
Patience Essah, “Slavery, Heritage and Tourism in Ghana,” International Journal of Hospitality and
Tourism Administration 2, no. 3/4 (2001): 45-46.
88 
Wright, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Eddy Harris, and others will be only selectively
interwoven into this paper in order to shed light on uniquely African American reactions to
African culture and politics.
Introduction
Holsey’s Routes of Redemption brilliantly constructs an anthropological theory
surrounding the cultural impact of tourism in Ghana on both everyday African American
tourists and Ghanaians, but it devotes far less time to the political implications of these
tourists’ redemptive journeys. In this chapter, I seek to explore the ideological
implications of African American travel to Ghana through an analysis of black tourists’
reactions to the their experiences at the country’s slave castles and beyond. I intend to
expand upon Holsey’s theory of back to Africa travel as a strictly redemptive process and
redefine it instead as a complicated, reflexive journey that is conducive to deeply personal
mourning, hidden transcripts of rage, and a nationalist and classist prioritization of African
American triumph that opposes Pan-African and Black Feminist rhetoric surrounding the
universality of black oppression.
Further, I contend that African American tourists in Ghana attempt to claim
heritage sites as spaces that belong to their history and are crucial to understanding their
contemporary identities. Through this declaration of autochthony, or assertion of an
89 
indigenous connection to Ghanaian spaces,188 I argue that African Americans are able to
use their time in Ghana to grapple with the anger towards America they possess but may
not be able to outwardly display at home. I posit that for African American travelers, visits
to Africa’s slave sites represent shocking events that engender Nationalist sentiments
surrounding self-determination and essentialism. Ghana and its slave sites, as distinctly
black spaces of refuge, become an off-site terrain for African Americans to publicly express
their sense of alienation from the dominant sphere and to act on their disillusionment with
the American Dream and their anger towards the white Americans they believe to be
complicit in their exclusion from the Dream’s attainment.
These hidden transcripts, however, may come at the expense of a global, Pan-
African orientation to nationalism. Due to the intensely personal nature of their trips and
the confinement of their journeys to travel agent controlled heritage sites, I suggest that
African Americans miss the potential for counterpublic collisions that could strengthen
commitments to a common, global black struggle. Caught up in their personal mourning
and the empowering realization of the strength of their race, African Americans often leave
Ghana without ever fully engaging with the Ghanaian counterpublics that exist outside
those spaces overseen by tourism boards and purposefully incorporated into travel
itineraries.
The type of travel investigated in this chapter is a form of leisure travel that
includes typical vacation activities such as relaxation, visits to heritage sites, and
                                                        
188
Jennifer Hasty, “Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of
Culture,” Africa Today 49, no. 3 (2002): 51,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/v049/49.3hasty.html.
90 
shopping, while simultaneously offering travelers a chance to find their “roots”. I suggest
that this mixture of pleasurable, leisure activity and painful, identity crisis makes it difficult
for travelers to focus their time on the global struggle of blacks. Richards explains, “As
vacationers, they conform to the expectation of displaying evidence of themselves having
an enjoyable trip; as descendants of the imprisoned, they produce an ambiguous
document, a competing memory.”189 Because the everyday tourist’s intention is not to
perform charity or service work, seek foreign education, or spread religion – forms of
travel that require a deliberate counterpublic collision – the variety of African American
tourism to Ghana assessed in this paper must be understood as inherently predisposed to
inward reflection versus collective gain.
I suggest that because most African Americans tourists center their time in Ghana
on constructing narratives of personal triumph instead of engaging with the variety of
collective resistance narratives that emerge through counterpublic collisions with everyday
spaces in Brazil, black tourists miss the opportunity for meaningful counterpublic
collisions in Ghana and undermine the potential for Pan-African ideology to enter those
tourists’ Nationalist discourses. Whereas emancipated spaces in Brazil celebrate black
resistance in its contemporary, ongoing form, heritage sites in Africa celebrate black
survival; a completed narrative that ends with the traveler’s redemptive return.
Hasty argues, “In the emphasis on mythic redemption,” African American
engagement with Ghana, “overlooks and even dismisses the interplay of ideological,
                                                        
189
Sandra L. Richards, “Cultural Travel to Ghana's Slave Castles: A Commentary,” International Research
in Geographical and Environmental Education 11, no. 4 (2002): 373,
http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/10382040208667506.
91 
historical, and regional forces that constitute postcolonial politics.”190 As a result, African
Americans craft an ideology centered on “the domestication of dreams,”191 instead of a
challenge to global hegemonic forces.
Public opinion research suggests that the middle class black travelers who often
travel to Africa are typically not, by nature, Cultural Nationalists who might see Africa as
the key component in their ideological construction.192 So why, then, do these travelers
set off for Africa? One black middle class traveler, Columbia English Professor Saidiya
Hartmann, explains that a visit to Africa was necessary because in America, she “felt like
an alien”193 and “had grown weary of being stateless.”194 A thirty-one year old solo
traveler described her journey in lyrical form: “A mixture of Nina Simone's moodiness and
Miles Davis' formless meandering. It would be a blend of ‘Sometimes I feel like a
motherless child/ a long way from home’ and… ‘Summertime and the living is easy/ fish
are jumping and the cotton is high/ your daddy's rich and your ma is good looking/ so
hush little baby, don't you cry.’ 195
While travelers such as these describe their journeys to Africa in terms of their
spiritual and psychological yearning for roots and identity – a Motherland – they
frequently balk at the idea of political discourses disrupting their quest.196 Performance
                                                        
190
Hasty, “Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption,” 58.
191
Ebron, “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics,” 927.
192
Dawson, Black Visions, sec. Appendix.
193
Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 1st ed. (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 7.
194
Ibid., 4.
195
Anonymous, “Identity Dilemma,” Travelogue, nomadic in april, August 30, 2004,
http://mezolife.blogspot.com/.
196
92 
theorist Sandra Richards suggests, however, “We posit our roots in Africa wherever
experiences resonate with, or seem familiar to what we have encountered – emotionally,
intellectually, or imaginatively – in black American communities. Thus, we journey to
Africa, hoping to briefly escape American racism and experience racial dignity at its
source.”197 Through the invocation of these familiar racial experiences, I argue that travel
to heritage spaces on the Slave Coast elicits in African Americans deeply political
reactions.
As resources in the production of racial dignity, slave sites enable black travelers to
see, quite directly, the ways in which dominant spheres have historically degraded them
through racial terror. Experience at these sites, combined with their preexisting belief that
America has turned its back on the black race, may lead African American travelers to
adopt certain aspects of Nationalist ideologies that typically appealed to less affluent
blacks.198 In 1967, Martin Luther King suggested, “Many middle-class Negroes have
forgotten their roots and are more concerned about ‘conspicuous consumption’ than about
the cause of justice.”199 Black travelers, however, tell a different story about their
commitment to racial advancement, often embracing ideologies whose proponents have
historically vilified the black middle class, labeling them traitors to their less successful
brothers and sisters. In particular, African American travelers often verbalize Nationalist
ideologies that position race over other identities as the primary source of their
                                                        
197
Sandra L. Richards, “What Is It To Be Remembered? Tourism to Ghana's Slave Castle-Dungeons,” in
Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, Rev. and enl. ed. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007), 88.
198
199
Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1st ed. (New York: Harper &
Row, 1967), 131.
93 
oppression, assert that whites have and continue to resist equality, and mandate self-
determination as the means for achieving equality.200
As Dawson claims, however, African American ideologies do not fit into neat
categories, and the fervently domestic and middle-class orientation of the Cultural
Nationalism that African American travelers engage in is evidence of the ways in which
unique travel experiences can contribute to seemingly antithetical ideological fusions.201
Instead of engaging with a Cultural Nationalist ideology based on alliances with the
Ghanaians they encounter, African Americans often celebrate the unique strength of their
personal survival as slave descendants and draw on that strength to construct ideologies
for domestic black advancement. This privileging of African American histories over those
of global blacks is inconsistent with traditional Black Nationalist ideologies, and
represents the ways in which African American tourists, as successful, middle-class blacks,
alter Cultural Nationalism in order to fit it into their distinctive worldview.
Dawson argues, “Cultural nationalists emphasize the need for a return to black
spiritual renewal, a return to the source, the need for metaphysical liberation as the
foundation for black liberation.”202 By facing the beginnings of their histories as African
Americans, black tourists embrace Africa as a space in which to visualize the roots of their
suffering and liberate themselves from this psychological burden. Beyond this personal
liberation, however, black travel narratives show little evidence of a Cultural Nationalist
commitment to understanding and working to defeat global black oppression. While
                                                        
200
201
202
Ibid., 104.
94 
Holsey suggests African Americans return from Africa, “armed to do battle with
inequality,”203 I argue that this battle is a distinctly domestic one.
This chapter thus suggests that African American tourism to Africa can have
transformative qualities that heighten awareness of self-determination, endow in travelers
a Nationalist rhetoric, and foster the production of hidden transcripts through an
engagement with heritage sites. I contend that though these experiences may lead to the
acceptance of strands of Nationalism that the black middle class typically oppose, the
transformation also evades some of Cultural Nationalism’s more global goals. African
American travelers adopt a distinctly black middle class nationalist agenda that is
manipulated through a self-centered, myopic understanding of the necessary steps for
black success. Through an engagement with historic and contemporary travel narratives I
will outline the ways in which black travel to Africa – against the Pan-African assumption
that engaging with African space results in a drawing nearer to a global black identity –
actually results in the creation of a global hierarchy of blackness and, in turn, fails to foster
the aspects of Cultural Nationalism that one would expect from an engagement with
connective marginality.
Anthropologist Edward M. Bruner’s extensive fieldwork in Ghana describes the
African American tourists to Africa’s Slave Coast as “a class-privileged and more educated
segment of the larger African American population, consisting mainly of those with the
money and the leisure time to make the long and expensive journey.”204 I argue that
                                                        
203
Holsey, Routes of Remembrance, 201.
204
Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” 290.
95 
positioned in a space that reminds them of their historic strength and their ability to make
it back through the “Door of No Return”, these African Americans are able to identify a
personal, emotional, self-determined success that is not dependent on the fulfillment of the
traditional, economic “American Dream” that scholars suggest disappoint so many in the
middle class.205 This chapter thus seeks to contribute to the field of African American
politics through its suggestion of travel as the source of an ideological shift that allows, if
only temporarily, for the merger or outward expression of historically oppositional
ideologies of Nationalism and Integrationism.
Hidden Transcripts of Rage
The emergence of a black middle class suggests to many in U.S. society that racial
discrimination is no longer a barrier in the pursuit of the American Dream. In Barack
Obama’s historic speech on race, “A More Perfect Union”, he proclaimed, “I will never
forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”206 Four years earlier,
as the keynote speaker for the Democratic National Convention, Obama made an even
more optimistic declaration, labeling America a “magical place.”207 These proclamations of
America’s friendliness to self-determination and material and social success for black
                                                        
205
See Hochschild, Facing up to the American Dream, chap. 3.; Cose, Rage of a Privileged Class, chap. 1;
Feagin and Sikes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience.
206
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Campaign speech, as prepared for delivery, Philadelphia, PA,
March 18, 2008), http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords.
207
Barack Obama, “Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention” (Speech presented at
the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Boston, MA, July 27, 2004),
http://www.barackobama.com/2004/07/27/keynote_address_at_the_2004_de.php.
96 
Americans reinforce to the dominant sphere the notion that U.S. society is a place in
which members of all races can achieve the American Dream.
Prominent African Americans, however, shot back at what they deemed to be the
painting of an accommodationist picture of contemporary race relations. Tavis Smiley
cried, “I love America, but this ain’t Disneyland. There’s nothing ‘magical’ about
America.”208 Cornel West echoed Smiley’s statements: “When I heard him say America is
a ‘magical place,’ I said what America are you talking about now, Negro? Come on now.
Come on now!”209 Such criticisms of Obama’s optimism underscore what Hochschild
contends is a “complacent interpretation of black success [that] fails to recognize that
African Americans have entered the mainstream middle class only at costs ranging from
heartache to death.”
A body of research by some of the country’s most prominent race scholars
suggests that while the public transcripts of the black middle class may show signs of
rapid progress and an appreciation for this advancement, hidden transcripts tell a different
story of frustration, alienation, and rage. As one African American traveler commented on
the Black is Beautiful! blog, “I am a REFUGEE IN AMERICA! That is what I feel
like.”210
                                                        
208
Kelefa Sanneh, “What He Knows For Sure: Tavis Smiley confronts the Obama candidacy.,” The New
Yorker 84, no. 23 (August 4, 2008): 28,
209
Cornel West, in Refresh Black America: Moderated by Roland Martin with Rev. Al Sharpton, Dr. Cornel
West, and Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (presented at the Refresh the World Symposium, Howard
University, 2009).
210
La-Kee-A Lowry, comment on “Back to Africa, Ghana, and the Problems to Work Out!,” Black is
Beautiful! blog, June 22, 2008, http://yeyeolade.wordpress.com/2007/01/13/back-to-
africaculturallyspirituallymorally-and-physically/.
97 
Expressions of anger and alienation such as these are repeatedly found in the
written and verbal records of African American travelers to Ghana, yet may belie black
middle class behaviors in America. As Scott asserts, “In ideological terms the public
transcript will typically, by its accommodationist tone, provide convincing evidence for
the hegemony of dominant values.”211 Yet the travel narratives that emerge from black
experiences “off stage” in Africa provide evidence of the hidden political and psychological
state of black travelers and underscore the importance of an analysis of counterpublic
discourses.
As tourism theorist Dean MacCannell explains, “The more the individual sinks
into everyday life, the more he is reminded of reality and authenticity elsewhere.”212 In this
section I will attempt to highlight the ways in which African Americans employ their time
abroad as a site for the outward expression of the real and authentic sadness and rage they
may feel the need to disguise at home. These transcripts, hidden through the movement of
African American travelers outside of the surveillance of United States, evidence the
alienation that black middle class Americans feel from U.S. society and speak to their
disappointment with the ways in which their economic and social successes in America
have failed to translate into a true fulfillment of the American Dream. Author Raoul Dennis
explains, “The peace of mind and sense of belonging that so many African Americans
                                                        
211
212
MacCannell, The Tourist, 170.
98 
spend their lives looking for through physical and material assimilation in the Western
world,” may actually be found in Africa.213
In The Time of Slavery, author Saidiya Hartman describes Elmina Castle214 as a
site for negotiating historical pain through a Bhabaian lens of the “projective past.”215
Hartman describes visits to the castle by African Americans as “belated encounters” – the
visitors come far too late to salvage Africa as home, family, or identity, and as a result,
shift the focus of the trip to the centuries of personal and ancestral experiences that have
transpired since the Middle Passage. Hartman argues, “The encounter with the seemingly
remote anteriority of the past – slavery and the transatlantic slave trade – provides a
vehicle for articulating the disfigured promises of the present, that is, equality, freedom
from discrimination, the abolition of the badges of slavery, and so on…for these reasons, it
is crucial to consider the matter of grief as it bears on the political imagination of the
diaspora.”216
For black middle class travelers, the thrusting of the in-between – the time from
Middle Passage to present – highlights their anger with the forces that have and continue
to oppress people of their race in America. One African American tourist speaking of his
emotions in the castle explained, “The rage I felt was incomprehensible. It shook me to
                                                        
213
Raoul Dennis, A Son Warms and Sets on African Soil (BET Publishing, 1995),
http://www.pbs.org/wonders/Episodes/Epi3/3_rete4a.htm.
214
Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 763,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v101/101.4hartman.html.
215
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 341.
216
Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” 763.
99 
the core.”217 This anger’s manifestation at the slave site often results in a heightened racial
consciousness that has distinct political implications.
Socioeconomists Gerald Jaynes and Robin Murphy Williams claim that racial
consciousness is comprised of four factors: “(1) a feeling of closeness or identification
with other group members; (2) dissatisfaction with group status, especially in the political
arena; (3) an attribution of the unsatisfactory group status to illegitimate causes such as
discrimination; and (4) a belief that group members must act collectively to improve the
group’s position.”218 Black travel narratives by visitors to Africa’s slave castles often
display a number of these racial consciousness indicators. For African Americans, their
anger with contemporary race relations and their positioning in a place that highlights the
source of their struggle serves to heighten racial consciousness. The link established
between race consciousness and political participation lends evidence to the argument that
travel serve as an impetus of ideology consideration.219
Interviews with high-achieving black executives by sociologist Sharon Collins
reflect the pain that many successful blacks feel as they try to navigate a white-dominated
world. Collins asserts, “As blacks in a white world, their survival and success [relies], at
least to some degree, on being ‘nonblack’ to win white acceptance…These managers’
success in the conservative world of large corporations require that they gloss over
                                                        
217
Stephen Buckley, “U.S., African Blacks Differ on Turning Slave Dungeons Into Tourist Attractions,”
Washington Post, April 17, 1995, Final edition.
218
Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society
(Washington, D.C: National Academy Press, 1989), 236.
219
L. C. Miller, R. Murphy, and A. H. Buss, “Consciousness of body: Private and public,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 41, no. 2 (1981): 397-406.
100 
potentially volatile differences where race matters.”220 Collins’ implication, that successful
blacks have had to suppress their true feelings in order to accommodate the expectations
of the white sphere, is crucial to understanding the role of black travel to Africa as a
potential outlet for political sentiments they have had to mask in the public, professional
sphere. A popular t-shirt sold at Cape Coast Castle serves as a metaphor for this constant
masquerade. While the shirt’s front carries the relatively triumphant and harmless phrase:
“Back to our heritage, Elmina Castle, 1482,” its back declares a distinctly angrier,
Nationalist message: “Damn right! Our people worked for 400 years without a paycheck.
Reparations are due!”221
Interviews with members of the black middle class suggest that the decision to co-
opt a form of liberal integrationist agenda in the public sphere does not always stem from
their disagreement with the tactics of more Nationalist ideologies. I suggest that
successful African Americans, given their precarious position in both black and white
communities, may either possess multiple, competing ideologies or mask their true beliefs
out of fear of mainstream reprisal, or both. For successful African Americans, a
commitment to liberal integrationism may be the result of their true desire and hope for the
realization of equality and the American Dream. Simultaneously, an adoption of cultural
Nationalist sentiment may be the result of successful African Americans’ disappointment
with the existing state of U.S. society and the American Dream that eludes them.
                                                        
220
Sharon M Collins, Black Corporate Executives: The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class, Labor
and social change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 152.
221
Cheryl Finley, “The door of (no) return,” Common-Place 1, no. 4 (2001): V.
101 
Yet these successful blacks may have to pick and choose which ideology to put on
public display. Research suggests that successful blacks worry that an outward display of
racial consciousness may hinder their professional success, as it did to members of the
black middle class such as journalist Joel Dreyfuss, who was denied a transfer to a
different bureau because of his outspoken nature on the topic of racism in the
workplace.222 Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Alvin Poussaint
explains, “It’s always a risk for a black person in a predominantly white corporation to
express individual anger.”223
Because the dominant bourgeoisie sphere fails to incorporate black discourses,
white Americans often have difficulty understanding the anger expressed by blacks.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim in their philosophical text, Empire, that white
Americans who view black anger as unacceptable behavior are taking in part in a form of
post-modern racism.224 Considering themselves far too educated and cosmopolitan to
espouse racism on biological grounds, Hardt and Negri claim that the white sphere now
resorts to a racism based on deviations from white culture. The authors claim that this
new form of racism functions “through first engaging alterity and then subordinating
differences according to deviance from whiteness. This has nothing to do with the hatred
                                                        
222
Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class, 20.
223
Alvin Poussaint, interview by Ellis Cose in The Rage of a Privileged Class, 1st ed. (New York:
HarperCollins, 1993), 32.
224
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), 191.
102 
and fear of the strange, unknown Other. It is a hatred born in proximity and elaborated
through the degrees of difference of the neighbor.”225
Sociologists Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes claim that because the black middle
class understand that outward displays of Nationalist ideologies are not regarded by the
dominant sphere as culturally appropriate,226 they must often mask their feelings through
integrationist, “theatrical imperatives.”227 Sniderman, Tetlock, and Carmines further
assert that the pressure for successful blacks to endorse Black Nationalist ideologies
despite operating in an integrated world results in a psychologically burdensome dilemma
that requires blacks to choose one ideology at the expense of the other.228
I suggest, however, that a distinct brand of Cultural Nationalism born of African
Americans’ frustration with the American Dream is at work in the hidden transcripts of
black communities and may, in certain cases, peacefully coexist with a liberal integrationist
ideology. In U.S. society, where the integrationist ideology is not only preferred by the
mainstream but also proves itself to be valuable in bringing the black middle class material
gain, successful African Americans may appear to simply adopt an integrationist ideology
with no questions asked. Yet the emotions expressed by African American travelers
illustrates a more complicated interplay of political ideologies. My assertion borrows from
the work of feminist Darlene Clark Hine, who suggests that for African American women,
“in the face of pervasive stereotypes…it was imperative that they collectively create
                                                        
225
Ibid., 194.
226
Joe R Feagin and Melvin P Sikes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994).
227
228
Paul M Sniderman, Philip Tetlock, and Edward G Carmines, eds., Prejudice, Politics, and the American
Dilemma (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993), 165.
103 
alternative self-images and shield from scrutiny these private, empowering definitions of
self.”229 I contend that dissemblance may also be understood as a tool of the black middle
class, and that an analysis of black travel dialogues in off-stage spaces reveals African
Americans’ private, empowering definitions of blackness that the dominant sphere at home
refuses to accept.
Middle class blacks who return to Africa often assert an inner anger and grief
through an engagement with what is known as thanatourism, or the travel to sites
associated with acts of violence and death.230 Slave sites, as ontological representations of
slavery, horror, and a limitation on unbound movement, help to explain the contemporary
conditions of black Americans. In doing so, the sites make it possible for African American
travelers to reject claims such as those made by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who
claimed in an interview with Ellis Cose that the black middle class is “caught with the
legacy of grievance which is inappropriate to their condition.”231
Ghana’s slave castles thus serve to bridge the suffering of the past with the
suffering of the present. As Richards argues, travel to Africa forces black travelers “to
succumb to memory’s temporality, in which past and present identities merge; African
Americans, in particular, are known to respond with uncontrollable tears or to direct their
anger at whites, seen as the contemporary agents of a historic oppression.”232 Holsey
                                                        
229
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4
(Summer 1989): 916, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174692.
230
A. V. Seaton, “Guided by the dark: From thanatopsis to thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage
Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 234-244.
231
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, interview by Ellis Cose in The Rage of a Privileged Class, 1st ed. (New York:
HarperCollins, 1993), 33.
232
Richards, “What Is It To Be Remembered? Tourism to Ghana's Slave Castle-Dungeons,” 95.
104 
further suggests that the emotional reactions of African American tourists stem from their
recollection of “crucial yet exceedingly painful collective memories that are deeply
engrained in their historical imaginations.”233
Travel to the slave castles brings African Americans into a claimed space that
inverts the colonial, Manichean paradigm, resulting in the positioning of whites as the
outsiders and blacks as the dominators of discourse through outward expressions of anger
and grief over historic wronging. Dallen Timothy and Victor Teye’s analysis of Elmina
Castle’s guest book comment log provides evidence of the political impact that a visit to a
site of slave heritage can have on travelers. The authors identify three particular themes in
the comments of African Americans: grief and pain, good versus evil (black versus white),
and revenge.234 While the dominant sphere in America is able to actively suppress the
expression of these feelings by African Americans at home, the black autochthony of
heritage spaces in Ghana creates sites for African Americans to write hidden, Nationalism-
oriented transcripts.
Some travelers manifest their rage physically. After emerging from a dark shrine
devoted to the spirits of slaves, African American tourists find themselves in a brilliant
courtyard that hosts the graves of a European colonial governor and his wife. In response
to this preservation of whiteness, some African Americans have spit and stomped on the
ground. Tour guides’ explanations that the governor had actually attempted to reduce
                                                        
233
Holsey, Routes of Remembrance, 198.
234
Dallen J. Timothy and Victor B. Teye, “American children of the African diaspora: Journeys to the
motherland,” in Tourism, Diasporas and Space, ed. Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 117.
105 
slave trading among locals and had ordered the closure of a tunnel in the men’s dungeon
only further annoys the tourists. The museum’s educator explains, black tourists “do not
like to hear that whites were friendly with some of the Africans.”235
Black middle class Americans, the perceived beneficiaries of white kindness in
contemporary America, are opposed to a historic retelling of this trope at Elmina even
more so than they are opposed to this retelling at home, where white surveillance may
censor their Nationalist impulses. The fiery criticism of Henry Louis Gates’ portrayal of
Elmina Castle in the television documentary Wonders of the African World,236 largely
centered on Gates’ minimization of white culpability for black enslavement. As one critic
argues, “What Henry Gates dished up in his film series was a characterization that enabled
many of our White American compatriots to persist in their longstanding, arrogant and
stubborn condition of moral denial – denial of systemic collaboration in and much
responsibility for what can only be called the ‘Black Holocaust.”237
When African Americans encounter whites at Elmina, they are often troubled by
the white visitors’ behavior and angered by the displays of sadness they deem inconsistent
with white collusion in black oppression. A Nigerian-born immigrant to the United States
who returned to Elmina had clearly not traveled there to find his roots, but reacted with
rage at the site of white travelers grieving in a black space: “I wanted to ask the White girl
why she was crying. I wondered what sadness she remembered, longed to know who she
                                                        
235
Holsey, Routes of Remembrance, 185-186.
236
Nicola Colton, Nick Godwin, and Helena Appio, Wonders of the African World: The Slave Kingdoms
(Disc 2), DVD (PBS Home Video, 2004).
237
Alamin M. Mazrui and Willy Mutunga, eds., “African Accomplices in Slavery: Electronic Debate,” in
Debating the African Condition: Mazrui and His Critics, vol. 1 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004),
404.
106 
saw in chains when the tour guide gave his descriptions…I scorned her in my glare but
she did not notice…I refused to join the show, here a sniffle, there a sniffle, mostly from
pink noses in distress, running from the truth of the moment, as plain as the sore noses on
their faces.”238 Ironically, black travelers express both a desire for whites to understand
their pain and make the claim that it is impossible for them to do so.
Another tourist, Kelsy Wrightson, details her frustration with the white tourists
who see their travel to the slave dungeons as a means to rid themselves of guilt: “Large
packs of primarily white tourists rush in and out of the door, collecting the experience in
their book for travels without truly realizing the implications of the journey for many. The
castle is a strange place. Made almost clean for the feet of many tourists coming to assuage
their own guilt.”239 These assertions, that the white tourist has grieved the pain of the
past without acknowledging his role in everyday oppression in America, evidence the
ways in which middle class black Americans continue to view racism as a chief cause of
their struggle at home. When tourism officials attempted to install a gift shop in Elmina
and spruce up its interiors with a fresh coat of paint, African American visitors joined in a
chorus of émigrés who viewed the restoration as an erasure of history. These visitors view
the castle not as a tourism site, but as a mourning space.240 One African American woman,
Vienna Robinson, editorialized:
                                                        
238
Anonymous, “Crying At The Cape,” Travelogue, Nigerian Boy: Notes on America, From a Not-So-Native
Son, July 20, 2006, http://nigerianboy.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html.
239
Kelsy Wrightson, “Cape Coast,” Travelogue, Kick At The Darkness, June 9, 2006,
http://krwrightson.blogspot.com/2006/06/cape-coast.html.
240
Christine Mullen Kreamer, “Shared Heritage, Contested Terrain: Cultural Negotiation and Ghana's Cape
Coast Castle Museum Exhibition "Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade",” in Museum Frictions: Public
Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 452-453.
107 
Are flowers being planted in the ovens at Auschwitz where millions of Jews
perished? Have the Death Chambers of horror been brightly painted to
somehow camouflage or silence the cries and screams of people who were
brutally tortured and murdered? Think about that and then think about the
Cape Coast and Elmina Castle/Dungeons on the Gold Coast of West
Africa, where you can still hear and feel the presence of our African
Ancestors when you enter the dark Dungeons and tunnels. But will this still
be true when they finish renovating the Castles and painting the insides of
the Dungeons?241
Though African American travelers claim ownership of the castles as black spaces
through the expression of sentiments such as Robinson’s, they are also aware of the
historic and contemporary presence of whiteness. Wrightson notes, “When you walk
around Cape Coast Castle, you get covered in a fine white dust, coming off of the perfectly
white washed walls. Ever so ironic if you ask me.”242 Travelers to Africa who might
ordinarily be unable to express their discontent with whiteness see their time in the slave
castles as opportunities to make public their hidden transcripts. One traveler’s assertion
that she was “An African, stolen and victimized by the USA,” is echoed in another’s
“Damn you white man!”243 Cheryl Finley quotes the logbook comments of one American
tourist from Connecticut: “Very impressive castle. Tour was very good. Great views
toward the city, beach and ocean. One concern—a man during the tour was distracting and
I felt offended by his anti-white sentiments, as he kept saying, ‘white people this…’”244
These emotional outpourings are indicative of attitudes that are unacceptable in
white, dominant spheres, where their expression is labeled unmerited and hostile. The act
                                                        
241
Vienna Imahkus Robinson, “Is the Black Man's History Being 'Whitewashed': The Castles/Dungeons of
the African Holocaust,” Uhuru, 1994, 48.
242
Wrightson, “Cape Coast.”
243
Timothy and Teye, “American children of the African diaspora: Journeys to the motherland,” 118.
244
Finley, “The door of (no) return,” pt. IV.
108 
of mourning thereby “addresses itself to the dismissal of grief as whining,”245 that middle
class black Americans repeatedly describe as a constant in their everyday interactions with
dominant spheres. While it is impossible to know the long-term implications of these
short-lived expressions of rage without further social scientific research, Dawson asserts
that traumatic national events and alienation from mainstream society contribute strongly
to an invocation of Nationalist sentiment.246 As a traumatic moment in which African
Americans move outside a dominant sphere and into an alienating space, I suggest that
back to Africa travel may amount to what Dawson labels a “shocking” event,247capable of
swaying black public opinion and ideological identification.
Triumph
The manifestations of rage that are common to African Americans’ slave site
experiences, however, are often complemented by equally compelling narratives of
triumph. For African American travelers, who have typically made at least modest material
gains in the United States, a return to the homeland frequently endows them with an
alternative measure of success. Stokely Carmichael argues that in the United States, two
forms of oppression are directed at Black Americans: “One is exploitation. Another is
colonization. With exploitation one is economically raped…But there is another type of
oppression – colonization. Colonization is not just the economic raping of someone, not
merely taking a lot of money away. Colonization deals with destroying the person’s
                                                        
245
246
247
Ibid., 86.
109 
culture, his language, his history, his total humanity.”248
While financially successful black Americans may feel confident they have conquered
elements of American exploitation, a trip to Africa and an off-stage reconnection with black
history and culture may represent an opportunity for African American travelers to finally
express at least a partial triumph over the colonial narrative. As much as black middle class
Americans feel alienated by their position in America, they often return to Africa deeply
proud of their ability to make it back. As Cornel West argues, black America has
historically been threatened by nihilism, a “profound sense of psychological depression,
personal worthlessness, and social despair.”249 Through their return to Ghana, successful
African Americans assert their agency in rejecting this nihilistic narrative and reconstruct
identities surrounding the history of their ancestors. Their pride stems not only from their
financial ability to pay for a trip – though many travelers do acknowledge that less
successful members of the black communities may never have the privilege of making it to
Ghana – but more importantly it stems from their race’s history of strength and mettle in
the face of oppression.
This essentialist understanding of blackness represents a pillar of Black Nationalist
thinking that middle class blacks typically avoid. But standing on the grounds of their
imagined homeland, African American travelers frequently evoke their blackness as the
source of strength that has enabled them to survive the Middle Passage, contend with a
shipwrecked identity in America, overcome discrimination, and ultimately return to Africa.
                                                        
248
Stokely Carmichael, “Pan-Africanism - Land and Power,” in Pan-Africanism, ed. Robert Chrisman and
Nathan Hare (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 10.
249
Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 13.
110 
As Maya Angelou writes, “I had finally come home. The prodigal child, having strayed,
been stolen, or sold from the land of her fathers…had at last arisen.”250 She continues,
“We had crossed the unknowable oceans in chains and had written its mystery into ‘Deep
River, my home is over Jordan.’ Through the centuries of despair and dislocation, we had
been creative, because we faced down death by daring to hope.”251
This romantic acknowledgment of African American survival recurs in the
contemporary narratives of black travelers who see their return as evidence of black
superiority and empowerment, answering Richard Wright’s question: “Was there
something in Africa that my feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear and
meaningful?”252 The site most frequently associated with this survival narrative is “The
Door of No Return,” through which black captives were marched from the dungeon to the
slave ship for centuries, so named because “nobody herded through that door was heard
from again. Nobody ever made it back. It was the gateway to oblivion.”253
On the organized Cape Coast Castle tour that thousands of tourists embark upon,
travelers’ encounters with the Door comes just after a stop in the female dungeons, a space
that forces tourists to confront the brutal history of rape and depravity that defined the
lives of their forebears. From these dark, mildewed dungeons that foster anger and rage at
the conditions their ancestors were faced with, black tourists stumble upon a climactic
                                                        
250
251
Ibid., 208.
252
Richard Wright, Black Power; a Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (Westport, Conn: Greenwood
Press, 1974), 4.
253
Daniel J. Wideman, “The Door of No Return? A Journey Through the Legacy of the African Slave
Forts: An Excerpt,” Callaloo 21, no. 1 (1998): 2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v021/21.1wideman_d.html.
111 
visualization of the Door of No Return. Tourists pass through the foreboding doors with a
sense of gloom, only to turn around and see a new sign on which the words “Door of No
Return” have been replaced with, “Door of Return.” 254 For African Americans, the sign
represents an acknowledgment of their personal autonomy and an opposition to their
original, white prescribed destiny. These African American histories form a distinctly
“black Bildungsroman” narrative255 in which the autonomous black experiences of the
travelers and their ancestors lead to a self-aware maturity embodied in their return to
Africa. The black tourist’s physical presence in Africa mobilizes what Judith Butler
describes as a “claim of bodily integrity and self-determination.”256
In this claim, African Americans distinguish their history from that of their enslaved
and oppressed ancestors and mark their own plot in history. Education theorist Paulo
Freire argues that through a self-aware distinction of one’s relation to the past, “people
develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in
which they find themselves.”257 I contend that in its rooting of history, travel to slave sites
facilitates a centering of blackness in African American tourists’ understanding of their
position in both history and contemporary society.
One African American tourist’s declaration upon returning from the slave castles
evidences the ways in which tourist sites may help black diasporans use knowledge of the
history of their racial oppression to engage with strategies for the future. College student
                                                        
254
255
Geta J. LeSeur, Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1995).
256
Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (January 3, 2003): 15,
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tap/sgs/2003/00000004/00000001/art00003.
257
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1986), 83.
112 
Chishinga Callender declares, “I am proud to be a descendant of strong black men and
women, a product of the African Diaspora, incredible. I wish slavery never happened, but
we can’t change the past, we can only change what is ahead of us.”258 As a confrontation
with the past, a visit to slave sites by successful middle class blacks validates self-
determination as a prevailing ideology in their histories and centers racial terror as a force
that must be opposed in the future.
In these instances, African American travelers find themselves “caught in the tension
between past histories that have settled in them and present discourses and images that
attract them.”259 From within these interstitial spaces, African American travelers are
afforded the opportunity to engage their historic struggles in order to strategize for the
future. Such a process has all the indicators of ideological formation, yet the cultural
nationalist sentiment that emerges does not fit neatly into a Nationalist ideological
framework. These travel experiences can instead be understood as productive in the
tourists’ “sampling from the menu of available belief patterns”260
Freire contends that self-determination is contingent upon a consciousness of the
shackles that constrain oppressed groups and the active quest to shed those shackles
through change.261 Black travel narratives suggest that through engagement with slave
sites, the black middle class becomes conscious of their historic and contemporary
                                                        
258
Chishinga Shira Callender, “A Dream Come True: A Journey to Ghana - December 29, 2008 to January
8, 2008,” Travelogue, Creative Strength, February 11, 2009, http://daringforcemdmph.blogspot.com/.
259
Dorothy C. Holland, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 4.
260
261
George David Miller and Conrad P Pritscher, On Education and Values: In Praise of Pariahs and Nomads,
Value inquiry Book Series v. 34 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 31.
113 
oppression while simultaneously encouraged to recognize their successes as a means for
political empowerment. Barker, Jones, and Tate explain that this paradoxical interplay of
oppression and empowerment stimulates political participation: “Blacks’ self awareness as
a discriminated and disadvantaged group in society leads them to be more politically active
than other disadvantaged groups who lack a comparable collective identity.”262
One 41-year old black female traveler expressed her awareness of black oppression
and linked her political future to a strategy of self-determination, stating, “I am the change
I have been waiting for. I no longer have an excuse for my inaction. I no longer can wait
for someone to do it for me. I must do IT because if I want more, I gotta do more. I
WANT MORE!” 263 This commitment to a boot-strap black ideology almost directly
mimics the calls of Malcolm X, who decried in his infamous speech The Ballot or the
Bullet, “We need a self help program, a-do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now
philosophy, a it’s-already-too-late philosophy. This is what you and I need to get with,
and the only time – the only way we're going to solve our problem is with a self-help
program. Before we can get a self-help program started we have to have a self-help
philosophy.”264
Another traveler, an education major who traveled to Ghana with a group of fellow
college students, echoed a call for black leadership and change: “[The trip] reminded me
                                                        
262
Lucius Jefferson Barker, Mack H Jones, and Katherine Tate, African Americans and the American
Political System, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1999), 238.
263
Anonymous, “Reflections of...,” Blog post, Diary of a Mad Black Teacher, February 12, 2009, http://mis-
education.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html.
264
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (Speech, Detroit MI, April 12, 1964); Reproduced in Malcolm X
Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, 1st ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1966).
114 
that I had a greater purpose, that my philosophy of education centered around change.”265
These introspective transformations reflect a creation of what Hardt and Negri label,
“geographical mythologies that mark new paths of destiny.”266
These paths that travelers take assume individual autonomy as their agents,
reminiscent of the creed of the Black Panther party, which declared in its 1966 platform
and program: “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black
Community. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine
our destiny.”267 For African American heritage tourists, the power to control their own
destiny may be derived from the visualization and direct engagement with their ancestors’
histories of strength and resilience. An African American blogger expressed this sentiment
exactly: “The Castles are monuments to an unbridled savagery but I also see them as a
having a positive story: resistance and triumph in the face of adversity - we survived
against the odds and if we survived the Slave castles and the Middle Passage we can
survive anything.”268
Frantz Fanon decrees in The Wretched of the Earth, “The violence which has ruled
over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the
destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference
                                                        
265
N. Day-Vines, J. M. Barker, and H. A. Exum, “Impact of diasporic travel on ethnic identity development
of African American college students,” College Student Journal 32 (1998): 450.
266
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 397.
267
Black Panther Party, “The Black Panther Party Platform and Program: What We Want, What We
Believe,” October 1966,
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/Panther_platform.htm
l.
268
Anonymous, “A brief report on my visit to Elmina and Cape Coast Slave Castles in Ghana,” Blog post,
Rhum Runner, July 29, 2008, http://rhumrunner.blogspot.com/2008/07/brief-report-on-my-visit-to-
elmina-and.html.
115 
of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed
and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own
person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.”269 In their unbridled descent back into the
spaces that once constrained their ancestors’ movements, African American tourists
openly and proudly heed Fanon’s subversive call.
Though critics of this redemptive narrative such as Saidiya Hartman may argue that
there is a “danger of facile invocations of captivity, sound bites about the millions lost, and
simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement,”270 the narrative trends of
African American tourists dispute her claim that redemption fails to foster a progressive,
postcolonialist discourse. While Hartman is disturbed by what she sees as the “conceits
about world peace and universal history entailed in the designation of [the slave sites] as
World Heritage sites,” she misses the accompanying, politically charged discourses that
the counterpublic writes into its hidden transcripts. Hooks establishes the political utility
of these transcripts in her explanation of the ways in which memory “calls us back to the
past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming bonds.”271 Through these
discourses with ourselves, hooks suggests, “We connect ourselves to a recuperative,
redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that
transcend the limits of the colonizing eye.”272
African American travelers, through both the rage they engage and the redemption
                                                        
269
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, 1st ed. (New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 199), 40.
270
271
bell hooks, “In Our Glory,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah
Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 53.
272
Ibid.
116 
they are motivated by, are offered a psychological outlet for both their anger and their
hope. The repercussions of these emotions, however, are difficult to measure in terms of
hard political data and must instead be understood as exogenous shocks to the everyday
black experience with distinctly political implications.
Complicating Cultural Nationalism
The strength that African American travelers derive from their often tumultuous and
triumphant returns to Ghana, however, may not translate into a politics of anti-colonialism
that links blacks to the oppressed peoples of the world. Instead, the redemptive journey
may simply become a “domestication of dreams,” in which Africa becomes a mere
backdrop for inward reflection and the selective importation of Nationalist ideologies. As I
have suggested, the self-centered return to Africa is for most tourists a chance to write
hidden transcripts of rage and redemption. These transcripts are the result of deliberate
encounters with slave sites and other controlled spaces that focus on the personal
transformation of one’s spiritual and political self. Yet by the sheer virtue of the placement
of these experiences in a foreign space, collisions must also occur between the traveling
counterpublic and the native, Ghanaian one.
Travel narratives, however, mostly either omit references to these encounters or
speak of them with disappointment and anxiety. While I previously suggested that African
American travelers are to blame for missed counterpublic collisions in Brazil, the tourist
experience in Ghana is often far more complicated. In Ghana, where the teachers of the
117 
history of slavery often ignore questions of morality273 and fail to address the system’s
impact on blacks in America,274 the Ghanaians who interact with tourists are often either
indifferent to or hostile towards the notion of blacks “returning home”. On the contrary,
African American tourists are often assertive in their attempts to control Ghanaian spaces,
self-centered in their redemptive journey, and restricted by itineraries to preordained,
controlled spaces. As a result, the counterpublic collisions between these two black
counterpublics are often far from productive in creating Pan-African discourses of
resistance and instead reinforce a form of American nationalism that fails to orient itself
towards a global black struggle. Hasty explains, “A narrative of pilgrimage that suspends
local notions of time and place for liminal rites of passage through African tradition is
incompatible with the negotiation of everyday life as transnational citizens
in…postcolonial Ghana.”275
For most African Americans traveling to Ghana, a previously arranged itinerary is
followed that leads travelers to specific cultural and historical sites oriented to black
tourists’ perceived wants and desires. The sites most common to these itineraries include
The W.E.B. DuBois Center for Pan African Culture, Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park,
Kumasi Ashanti Kingdom, Manyhia Palace Museum, Prempeh II Jubilee Museum,
Kakum tropical rain forest and, and finally, the Cape Coast and Elmina slave castles.276
                                                        
273
Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl, eds., Buying Freedom: The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption
(Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2007), 250.
274
275
276
This itinerary is based on the offerings of Spector Travel, one of the largest travel agencies catering to
African American tourists. An internet search for “Ghana heritage tours” yields itineraries with little
variation from the one listed here.
118 
This selection of sites and experiences is deeply troubling in its telling of only three
histories: the history of traditional African greatness, the history of slavery, and the
history of elite black intellectuals such as DuBois and Nkrumah. Absent from these
histories are the contemporary narratives of everyday Ghanaian struggle.
In those instances in which African Americans do interact with the Ghanaian
counterpublic, it is often in staged settings. The traditional kente cloth weaving village
that tourists routinely stop at on their return from the Kakum rainforest is but one
example of the many staged encounters that incorporate ceremonies replete with drums,
dancing, and even the offering of one’s “African name” into the touristic experience. Even
when tourist sites do offer the chance for counterpublics to interact, rules decreed by the
tourism board often limit these interactions to carefully controlled conversations. Many
sections of Elmina Castle, for example, are reserved solely for tourists.277 The Ghanaians
who are allowed to enter these spaces are mostly tour guides who have been trained on
proper behavior in front of sensitive Western tourists.278
Many tourists happily accept these pre-packaged collisions, leaving the country with
memories of the country’s laid back way of life, its traditions, and its beauty. As one
tourist wrote, “I thought [visiting a small village] would be one of those moments on
                                                        
277
T. A. Singleton, “The Slave Trade Remembered on the Former Gold and Slave Coasts,” Slavery &
Abolition 20, no. 1 (1999): 158.
278
According to slave site researcher Coleman Jordan: “Renee Neblet, an African-American artist and
founder of Kokrobitey School in Ghana, created an exercise for the tour guides that used their own cultural
tools of storytelling and superstition. She asked them to write down and then tear up and throw away the
names of their beloved family members. This struck a chord with her students, who felt they were
participating in a metaphorical destruction of their families. Many of the Ghanaian tour guides and
administrators were actually brought to tears by this exercise, rather than by the raw emotions of the black
American visitors.” In “Ghana's Slave Castles and the Roots of African Diaspora Identity,” Journal of
Architectural Education 60, no. 4 (2007): 20.
119 
television when BBC or PBS shows us video of indigenous natives with no education or
heart. What I was exposed to was the prettiest of truths.”279 For these travelers, Ghana
remains a space in which to contend with identity, rage, and redemption. Their travel fails
to inspire a shared sense of global resistance simply because of its confined,
uncomplicated, and preordained narratives.
Black travelers’ unwillingness to stray from these narratives is representative of their
strong preference for structured travel. As one black travel agent explains, “Very seldom
will you see a lot of Black people, a lot of Black Americans outside of, you know, safe
areas…We travel very differently than other people…[black travelers] would only go [to
a new destination] if somebody recommended it.”280 One African American tour guide
suggests that the desire to stay on a travel group’s predetermined itinerary “speaks to the
mentality ingrained in us that there is safety in numbers and that on our own, we are
vulnerable to slights, insults [and] an added element of insecurity.”281
While most black travelers fail to adopt Pan-African sentiment because of their
unwillingness to stray from the typical path, for other tourists, Pan-African sentiment does
not resonate with them because when they do venture outside of controlled destinations
and into problematized spaces they are troubled by their interactions. These tourists, who
may either engage in spaces more deeply by choice or because of an unintended
                                                        
279
J. Bronson, “Accra, Ghana. The Land of Gold..,” Blog post, Travelpod,
http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jbrunson/1/1220203200/tpod.html.
280
David L. Butler, Perry L. Carter, and Stanley D. Brunn, “African-American travel agents: Travails and
Survival,” Annals of Tourism Research 29, no. 4 (October 2002): 1029,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V7Y-475YF0F-
8/2/4b5af695894221834a0bc9c818c2d88b.
281
Monique Wells, “Paris: Beyond the Comfort Zone,” Soul of America,
http://www.soulofamerica.com/paris-beyond-the-comfort-zone.phtml.
120 
disturbance to their travel, encounter contestatory counterpublic spaces that complicate
Nationalist ideologies. For these tourists, “The romantic, hence circumscribed, view of
Africa as a blissful place, filled with wonderful people known for their unbound hospitality,
[does] not accurately reflect the truth about this complex continent.”282
Black tourists’ unromantic insights into their perceived homeland, coupled with
their preoccupation with a self-centered pilgrimage, serve to erode the precise type of Pan-
Africanism that both Cultural Nationalists and Ghana’s tourism board expect to emerge
from diasporic travel. Judith Butler asks, “Could the experience of a dislocation of First
World safety not condition the insight into radically inequitable ways that corporeal
vulnerability is distributed globally?”283 Perhaps it could in some cases, but for most
African American tourists to Ghana, this dislocation never occurs along the carefully
constructed pathway that defines most black travel to the “homeland.”
Whitney, an African American student who traveled to Ghana with a group of her
peers, explained in an interview that many stops on her itinerary failed to inspire a
connection with Ghanaians: “It was hard for me and others to be touched because they
were giving packaged stories, it was a script that they had told countless groups before me
and would tell countless groups after me…I thought, I could have just read about this
online.”284 In some of the “traditional” villages that see a great deal of tourists, local
Ghanaians have further capitalized on the African Americans’ intrigue. As one blogger
                                                        
282
Godfrey Mwakikagile, Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and
Realities, 2nd ed. (Johannesburg, South Africa: Continental Press, Pan-African Books, 2005), 82-83.
283
Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 18.
284
Whitney, interview with the author. March 26, 2009. Princeton, NJ.
121 
writes, “Adenomas [a village outside of Kumasi] had an official tour of the Kente weavers
shop, the village, and the cocoa plantation…for an extra $.40, you can take all the still
photos you want.”285
The commoditization of their journey is often difficult for African Americans to
accept because it transforms their pilgrimage into a mere vacation.286 Whereas African
American tourists envision their return to the homeland as a quest to find their brothers
and sisters, Ghanaians view these tourists’ returns as an opportunity for financial gain in a
deeply impoverished country. Maya Angelou writes of her arrival in Ghana: “We had
come to Africa from our varying starting places and with myriad motives, gaping with
hungers, some more ravenous than others, and we had little tolerance for understanding
being ignored. At least we wanted someone to embrace us and maybe congratulate us
because we had survived.”287 Yet contemporary black travelers play an active role in the
Ghanaians’ recasting of self-identified pilgrims as mere tourists. This is, quite simply,
because they act the part.
Whitney describes the Ghanaian attitude directed towards black travelers in one
market as troubling: “I wanted to buy t-shirts, but I also wanted to bargain. And the guy I
was haggling with said, ‘You know, when white people come here, they always want to
help us out and pay what we ask. But when black people come, they nickel and dime us.’
                                                        
285
Anonymous, “Ashanti Region, Ghana, Africa,” The Vineyard and Vermont, January 24, 2009,
http://vineyardvermont.blogspot.com/2009/01/ashanti-region-ghana-africa.html.
286
287
122 
And I can totally see that, white people feeling bad about bargaining.”288 While Whitney
viewed her attempts at haggling as the normal behavior for a tourist-oriented marketplace,
anthropologists suggest that Ghanaians see this sort of behavior as evidence of the ways
in which blacks have become Americanized.289 For Ghanaians, these travelers can’t have it
both ways in their desires to be both pilgrims and tourists. Ghana’s Commissioner on
Culture explained, “With better education and deeper pockets, African-Americans strike
many Ghanaians as arrogant. When they get into any situation they want to take over.”290
Whitney, though, saw things differently. “Ghana is supposed to be all about welcoming
us home,” she explained, “Well I am home! So gimme a discount!”291
Whitney’s rationale mimics those of black travelers before her, who claim Ghana as
their homeland and are surprised when not afforded certain benefits for their status as
black brothers and sisters. At Cape Coast Castle, where non-Ghanaians are charged an
admission fee ten times the amount of locals, 292 one group of West Indian tourists refused
to pay in protest. “We didn’t pay to leave; why should we have to pay to return,” they
asked.293
In response, Ghanaian officials often suggest that if African Americans are going to
claim their country as a home, it is their responsibility to maintain it financially. When
African American tourists began complaining in the mid-1990s about white organizations
                                                        
288
289
290
Mwakikagile, Relations Between Africans and African Americans, 360.
291
292
Finley, “The door of (no) return,” pt. II.
293
Cheo Tyehimba, “Scarred Walls of Stone,” I've Known Rivers: The MoAD Story Project, January 2006,
http://www.iveknownrivers.org/read-2.0.php?id=38.
123 
such as USAID and the Smithsonian Institute becoming too involved in the preservation
of Elmina Castle, the regional director of Ghana’s board of museums and monuments
declared, “They come in here and they cry and throw themselves on the ground, but they
don’t want to contribute anything to what we’re doing. Then they want to have a big say
in what we do,”294 to which one African American responded, “The ancestors of African
Americans paid the highest price already.”295
The resistance to African American tourists’ appropriation of the castles represents
the ways in which some Ghanaians view the tourists’ behavior as presumptuous and
distinctly American. Ironically, those tourists who seek to shed all that is wrapped up in
their contemporary American identity through a visit to Africa often find that Ghanaians
quickly re-cast them into the role they are seeking to escape. As African author Godfrey
Mwakikagile complains, “African Americans return to Ghana, not as black people imbued
with African ideas and culture. Rather, African American return as know it all Americans;
and products of centuries of being brainwashed about Africa.”296
This rejection of African Americans as brothers and sisters often renders tourists
with a feeling of double alienation. Excluded from dominant society at home, the cold
responses of Ghanaians to the notion that their country is a homeland to anyone but
themselves may leave African Americans feeling further alienated, rejected from their
imagined place of refuge. In her travelogue, “Appointment in Ghana,” author Renee Kemp
appropriates Africa as her homeland through conversations with the spirits of her
                                                        
294
Buckley, “U.S., African Blacks Differ on Turning Slave Dungeons Into Tourist Attractions.”
295
Ibid.
296
Mwakikagile, Relations Between Africans and African Americans, 163.
124 
ancestors. She writes, “I understand that I have been singled out by the spirits of my
ancestors to tell their story. It is their presence I feel beside me and it is why they whisper
incessantly from the moment I arrived in the country, ‘where have you been daughter?’”297
But while the spirits of one’s ancestors may confirm this romantic narrative of the prodigal
daughter’s return, the contemporary reactions of everyday Ghanaians are far chillier.
Perhaps the most troubling experience to African American tourists is their
realization that when Ghanaians use the term obruni to greet them, they are welcoming
them as “whiteman”. Despite efforts by Ghana’s tourism board to replace the word with
the newly coined, less caustic phrase, “Akwaaba anyemi,” (Welcome Brother and
Sister),298 recent travel narratives suggest that the campaign has failed to catch on outside
of government controlled tourist spaces. Everyday Ghanaians still prefer obruni, which
despite carrying far less of a racial connotation than its translation implies – it is directed
towards just about anyone who looks or acts foreign – offends black travelers
nonetheless.299 The fact that obruni is cried out at tourists from a myriad of ethnic
backgrounds may only deepen the pain for African Americans, who are forced to realize
that there is nothing special about them in the eyes of the Ghanaians, despite their
assertions of shared ancestry, skin color, and oppression. Author Gwendolyn Brooks
explains, “The people here carry on their lives with – it seems – scarcely a thought of
                                                        
297
Renee Kemp, “Appointment in Ghana: An African American Woman Unravels the Mystery of Her
Ancestors,” Modern Maturity 17 (August 2000): 7.
298
Jordan, “Ghana's Slave Castles and the Roots of African Diaspora Identity,” 57.
299
Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” 295.
125 
their stolen brothers and sisters over the way there, far over the way.”300
The Cultural Nationalist sentiment with which African Americans begin to identify
with while abroad is thus problematized by the reactions of Ghanaians to their presence. If
Nationalists hold that “black people must realize that they are at war with the white
world,”301 where does that leave the black middle class travelers who have been rejected as
black by their proposed brothers in arms? If the Black Power Movement’s Gary
Declaration asserts, “Wherever America faces the...forces of the non-white world, its goal
is domination by any means necessary,”302 how do the behaviors of black tourists who
attempt to appropriate Ghanaian slave sites for their personal agendas further this form of
American hegemony? If Stokely Carmichael views “the struggle in the States as part and
parcel of the entire world struggle, particularly the black struggle,”303 are the redemptive
journeys of African Americans made insignificant by the continued existence of systems of
oppression in Ghana that they fail to fight? As Roscoe Lee Brown warned Maya Angelou
before she departed for Ghana: “Be careful, sweet lady. You went to Africa to get
something, but remember you did not go empty handed. Don’t lose what you had to get
something which just may not work.”304
For African Americans, the complicated interactions that accompany their travel to
Ghana establish barriers to the full acceptance of an uncomplicated Cultural Nationalist
                                                        
300
Gwendolyn Brooks, “African Fragment,” in Report from Part One, 1st ed. (Detroit: Broadside Press,
1972), 89.
301
Van De Burg, “Modern Black Nationalism,” 152.
302
Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., “The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads,” in
Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology
(Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 493.
303
Carmichael, “Pan-Africanism - Land and Power,” 13.
304
126 
ideology. African Americans may come to realize that this globally-oriented ideology
simply does not work into their middle class narrative of success, triumph, and a desire for
change at home. And why would it? Inextricably tying global black liberation to a true
achievement of success is inherently undermining to the achievements of middle class
black travelers. Unwilling to let go of their progress abroad, African Americans hold onto
their deeply personal transformative experiences and accept their struggle as a distinctly
local one. As Hasty asserts, “The withdrawal from African political reality and the retreat
to a mystical yet emphatically material time-space in the framing of the diasporan political
agenda is clear.”305
When these African political agendas are rejected and the discourses that tourists
attempt to control during counterpublic collisions are challenged, African Americans are
forced into a relationship with Africa that is predicated on distinctly personal gain.
Though Fanon’s call for a consciousness of the colonized is certainly realized through
black travel to Africa, this black consciousness often fails to extend beyond the African
American experience. Africa, then, rather than existing as a site of productive,
counterhegemonic engagement, exists instead as a site for escape and personal
transformation. As Hartman suggests, “Slavery once again becomes a distinctly American
story,” 306 politically potent nonetheless.
                                                        
305
306
127 
Conclusion
African American tourism to Africa is a complicated process of political ideology
reconsideration. The black middle class tourists who embark on tours to Africa represent a
privileged portion of American society that has traditionally been opposed to Cultural
Nationalist tendencies because of their relatively integrated position in American society.
As a result of their tenuous position in white dominant spheres, middle class African
Americans are often unable to express themselves because of the potential impact of such
sentiment on their personal and political wellbeing. Yet through their engagement with
slave sites, these African American travelers express a rage that takes on a distinctly
Nationalist tone. Perhaps because of the location of these slave sites outside the
surveillance of the white, dominant sphere, African American travelers feel comfortable
outwardly displaying their internal ire.
In their hidden transcripts, black travelers express anger over their history of
oppression and outwardly direct their resentment towards whites, who they deem historic
and contemporary purveyors of racism. Through travel to Africa, African Americans
become “unashamed of [their] rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical
consciousness, to come to full decolonized self-actualization.”307 I posit that African
American travelers’ engagement with sites of historic oppression and transient discourses
of rage constitute an exogenous shock to their identity and may contribute to lasting
political ideology shifts.
                                                        
307
bell hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism, 1st ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1995), 16.
128 
Yet the back to Africa narrative is not an entirely disturbing one. For many black
travelers, the return to Africa represents a personal triumph over a history of depraved
oppression. Their engagement with the slave site places African American travelers into an
ongoing history of resistance, and travelers often call upon the strength of their forebears
as a source of empowerment and a strategy for the future. African American scholar Eddie
Glaude argues that the narrative of slavery as a testament to African American strength is
a recurring one in black history. Glaude writes, “The manner in which memories of Africa,
the Middle Passage, slavery, and brave acts of overcoming hardships were mobilized
enabled the projection of a national community and the production of specific vocabularies
to speak about and to argue for emancipation, citizenship, and self-determination.”308 The
physical return to Africa serves as an extension of this historic mobilization. In the slave
spaces of Ghana, African Americans reject a nihilist stereotype and assert their autonomy.
I argue that African American travel to Ghana is far more significant than a fleeting
encounter with one’s painful memory, and is instead a recuperative journey that radicalizes
the identity of the traveler.
This radicalization process has the potential to foster global liberatory discourses
through the collisions of Ghanaian and African American counterpublics. Yet the itinerary
that black travelers follow and the tourists’ attempted appropriation of Ghanaian cultural
sites for personal mourning have resulted in counterpublic collisions that often leave
traveler and local feeling distant rather than united. I argue that African American travelers,
                                                        
308
Eddie S Glaude, Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 86.
129 
exposed to indifferent Ghanaians and misrepresentative depictions of black life in Ghana,
opt to use their time abroad for inward reflection instead of collective advancement.
130 
 
Chapter Four
Tourism and Political Ideology Formation:

Concluding Thoughts on the Relevance of
Black Travel as a Counterpublic Space
Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries
and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods or
utility that matter, but movement: not where you are or what you have, but where you come from,
where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.
– C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963)
ultural anthropologists Deborah Pruitt and Suzanne LaFont claim, “Tourism
C creates a social space ripe with possibilities for change through the interplay
between conventional scripts and new ideas.”309 While these changes have almost
exclusively been understood in academia through a cultural lens, this thesis lends evidence
to the need for a political analysis of tourism in order to understand how the experiences of
travelers in their time abroad are uniquely capable of complicating, disrupting, or
strengthening previously held ideologies. For African American tourists who travel to
Ghana and Brazil, the sudden participation in a majority black society with different
conceptions of blackness and new strategies of resistance often leads to transformations of
one’s self-identity and political worldview.

                                                        
309
Deborah Pruitt and Suzanne LaFont, “For Love and Money: Romance Tourism in Jamaica,” Annals of
Tourism Research 22, no. 2 (1995): 436, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V7Y-
3YCMGTV-C/2/fad5c7e6082df25921587a29e51c01b2.
131 
Chapter Four: Tourism and Political Ideology Formation
I have argued that when liberated from the surveillance of white, hegemonic
society in the United States, African American travelers become enmeshed in an
emancipated space that enables engagement with issues that are often times too sensitive,
troubling, or difficult to contend with at home. In its Position Paper on Black Power, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee posited, “If people must express themselves
freely, there has to be a climate in which they can do this. If blacks feel intimidated by
whites, then they are not liable to vent the rage that they feel about whites in the presence
of whites…A climate has to be created whereby blacks can express themselves.”310
For middle class black travelers who may feel stifled by dominant oppression at
home but too fully integrated into white society to remove themselves from it, the
Cultural Nationalist call for separatism may only be feasible through temporary escape.
Ghana and Brazil thus offer what Scott labels “off-stage” spaces in which to confront
Nationalist ideologies and empower or problematize their understandings of self. I argue
that in both problematizing and empowering spaces, the African American tourist must
face drastically different conceptions of blackness that radicalize political sentiments and
result in fresh strategies for dealing with the struggle that accompanies being black in
America.
In Brazil, these spaces offer black tourists distinctive ideologies of resistance that
globalize the African American struggle. For many African American travelers, time spent
in Brazil is enlightening. When they return from their travels, they return with an
                                                        
310
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Excerpts From Paper on Which the 'Black Power'
Philosophy Is Based,” The New York Times, August 5, 1966,
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=82502929&Fmt=7&clientId=17210&RQT=309&VName=HNP.
132 
understanding of how blackness operates in a Brazilian context and are empowered by the
abilities of Afro-Brazilians to retain their culture in the face of historic colonial oppression
and contemporary society’s preoccupation with whiteness. The experiences of African
American travelers in Brazil support Gilroy’s theory on the cross directional cultural flows
of the Black Atlantic and de-center the United States in the study of blackness. Through
experiences in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, African American travelers are
exposed to black communities that employ cultural forms to create counterhegemonic
discourses. The distinctly Cultural Nationalist forms of resistance that these black
travelers encounter in Candomblé terreiros, Capoeira performances, and Carnaval
celebrations contribute strongly to travelers’ racial consciousness and understanding of
black culture as black power.
Tourism theorist Erik Cohen explains that travel is capable of establishing a
foreign space in which travelers may make personal, existential transformations. Through
their journeys to Brazil, African American travelers come to distinguish “the world of their
everyday life, where they follow their practical pursuits, but for them is devoid of deeper
meaning; and the world of their ‘elective’ centre, to which they…depart on…pilgrimages
to derive spiritual sustenance.”311 For African American tourists to Brazil, this spiritual
sustenance often takes on a decidedly political form, as travelers come to value spiritual
expression as a valuable weapon of resistance against hegemonic oppression. Through
their exposure to Afro-Brazilian life, African American tourists may be able to place their
                                                        
311
Erik Cohen, “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Sociology 13, no. 2 (May 1, 1979): 190,
http://soc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/2/179.
133 
struggle into a global context. As one African American tourist explained, “What it did for
me, I believe, is serve as confirmation of the fact that in America there is, beyond
segregated bathrooms – or should we say the explicit language or reality of racism – that
this shit is beyond that. Its real. It’s in the atmosphere. It’s in the spiritual,
intellectual…the ethos of the society. So what apparently happens is that you were
already somewhat conscious before you left. But by being there and the experiences that
you had and seeing people of color acting more unfettered or less shackled in their
movements or their reality of oppression by racism…and then coming back to the US and
seeing a reverse…knowing what goes on in Brazil made me realize how entrapped we are
here. We need to figure out a way to overcome that.”312
As opposed to the pedagogic political transformation that black travelers undergo
in Brazil, African American tourists in Ghana engage with a far more self-reflexive
politicization process. Through their visits to Elmina and Cape Coast Castles – the
quintessential lieux de mémoire that “crystallize and secrete” slavery as a force in the lives
of black Americans 313 – African American travelers confront their history of oppression and
claim Nationalist sentiments that not only help explain their current position in American
society but also endow them with a sense of pride and consciousness that leads travelers
to see themselves as agents of change in U.S. society. Though “true” Nationalists may
assert that middle and upper class African Americans “have striven to become ‘white
middle class,’ believing and acting as if they were exempt from the open contempt in
                                                        
312
313
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7,
134 
which whites hold their race [and] trying to escape psychologically from their identity as
Negroes in practicing an unmitigated opportunism,”314 the sentiments expressed by
African American travelers suggest that this understanding of black middle class ideologies
may be far too narrow and misrepresentative of their true desire to challenge white
dominant discourses.
Rather than embracing white America and trying to escape their fundamentally
black marginalization, African American travelers use the slave sites as grounds to vocalize
their rage against dominant oppression and assert aspects of Cultural Nationalist thought
such as self-determination and black pride. Though these feelings may take a back seat in
African American ideology at home, they become outwardly expressed and prioritized
upon confrontation with slavery and a realization of its contemporary repercussions. The
sentiments expressed at the slave sites suggest that middle class African Americans may,
in fact, possess multiple ideologies at once. In opposition to what many in the Black
Nationalist community claim, African Americans’ success in mainstream America may not
displace a Cultural Nationalist orientation, but instead simply complicate the ideology’s
unquestioned embrace.
For African Americans who contemplate their position in history through an
engagement with sites of memory, the return to Africa may represent a triumph in the face
of slavery’s legacy. These travelers embrace the self-determination and autonomy that
Cultural Nationalism espouses, and see their triumph as a testament to their essential
                                                        
314
Essien Udosen Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962), 1.
135 
strength as black humans. Instead of turning to foreign blackness as a source of strength,
African American travelers in Ghana look inward. As Hartman writes, “For me, returning
to the source didn’t lead to the great courts and to the regalia of kings and queens. The
legacy that I chose to claim was articulated in the ongoing struggle to escape, stand down,
and defeat slavery in all of its myriad forms. It was the fugitives legacy.” 315 Armed with
this legacy, travelers such as Hartman return from Africa endowed with a racial
consciousness that research suggests has a lasting impact on blacks’ sense of personal and
political efficacy.
For black travelers, however, the triumphant “return to the Motherland” is
complicated by interactions with Ghanaian counterpublics that reduce their racial
consciousness to a strictly domestic form. Due to their carefully controlled itineraries and
the tendency of tourism boards to restrict African-American/Ghanaian interactions, black
travelers are often unable to fully engage with foreign black counterpublics, and may leave
disappointed with their failure to find a sense of kinship in their perceived homeland.
Because of the troubling or nonexistent interactions that travelers have with Ghanaians,
African Americans must often use their time in Ghana for deeply personal reflection that
shuts out the possibility of Ghana as a site for fostering a connection to the global black
struggle.
According to some in the Nationalist movement, “Control of the black nation-state
had to be viewed as part of a worldwide, anticapitalist liberation movement, not as an end
                                                        
315
Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 234.
136 
in itself. There could be no separate peace with the oppressor.”316 The nationalism found
in African American tourists’ rage and redemption narratives, however, fails to adopt this
credo. Instead, black travelers weave their new and competing worldviews into old ones,
creating distinct and valuable ideologies that fit outside traditional categories. Despite its
inability to foster a global, pan-African consciousness, Ghana must nonetheless be valued
as a counterpublic sphere that provides a source of personal strength, a site for internal
revolution, and an off-stage space for the production of hidden, empowering transcripts.
Limitations of Study
and Suggestions for Future Research
U nintended Collisions
This paper’s limited focus on Brazil and Ghana provides evidence only of
transformative experiences in foreign spaces where African Americans deliberately set out
to undergo black counterpublic collisions in meaningful, connective ways. Yet African
American travelers often venture abroad for less noble or conscious reasons.
Market research suggests that the most popular foreign tourist destinations among
African Americans are islands in the Caribbean,317 particularly Jamaica and the Bahamas.318
Though these countries possess vibrant black cultures that may be of interest to African
American travelers, it is the more hedonistic pleasures of the islands that are emphasized
                                                        
316
Van De Burg, “Modern Black Nationalism,” 240.
317
National Tour Assocation, Tour Operators’ MAP (Market Assessment Plan) for the
African American Market (National Tour Association, 1997), 40,
http://www.ntaonline.com/includes/media/docs/map-african.pdf.
318
Butler, Carter, and Brunn, “African-American travel agents,” 1029.
137 
by tourism boards, journalists, and mainstream culture. As a result, the notion that the
Caribbean may be a rewarding place to find heritage, roots, and identity is often
overshadowed by better-publicized cultural destinations such as Brazil and Ghana.
Though African American tourists may travel to the Caribbean merely for recreation and
escape, it is worth investigating what happens to political ideologies, if anything, when
African American tourists interact with black counterpublics in leisure-oriented
destinations.
According to Bahamian novelist Ian Gregory Strachan, “Many African Americans
visit the [Caribbean] with an air of superiority similar if not identical to that of white
tourists. Numerous African Americans see the region as one homogenous clump to which
they have attached unsavory associations, stereotypes and myths. And many expect
maximum service (servility?) for their hard-earned dollars.”319 Given this representation of
African American travelers, a more thorough investigation into the results of Afro-
Caribbean collisions may lend insight into the ways in which political ideology is
challenged in places where travelers may simply be seeking the sun: less concerned with
black life abroad and unprimed for connective experiences.
Unfortunately, little social science research has been conducted that looks into the
politics of leisure tourism. What has been noted in travel research, however, is that leisure
tourism occasionally turns into sex tourism, a distinctly politically charged, cross-cultural,
and hegemonic variety of travel. I suggest that if viewed through a political science lens,
                                                        
319
Ian G Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean, New World
studies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 13.
138 
the interactions between participants in sex tourism may be understood as counterpublic
collisions that complicate ideologies in intriguing ways. While some heritage sites do exist
in countries such as Cuba and Jamaica, a concerted effort on the part of tourism boards is
made to paint the Caribbean as a place to unwind, avoid the stresses of everyday life, and
engage in a pleasure-seeking escape from the United States. Black Enterprise, Ebony,
Essence, and other black magazines reinforce this notion and push the meaning of “escape”
to mean something more, routinely publishing articles with suggestive titles such as “Hot,
Hot, Hot: Sizzle to the Sounds of the Caribbean Beat.”320
The 1992 film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back
solidified the pleasure-seeking African American tourist narrative in the mainstream with
its tale of a successful but unhappy middle-aged black woman who travels to Jamaica in
order to escape the burdens of her hectic lifestyle as a stock-broker only to find love in the
form of a strapping young Jamaican.321 In one scene in the film, the young Jamaican man’s
mother asks Stella, “Are things so bad in America that black women have to travel
overseas to find a man?”322 Though a seemingly innocent remark on Stella’s decision to
date her son instead of an American man, the implication is clear: one may need to step out
of black America – with its high incarceration rates, low education levels, short life
expectancy, and racial wealth gap – to find a worthy partner.
                                                        
320
Nicholas S Charles, “Hot, Hot, Hot: Sizzle to the Sounds of the Caribbean Beat,” Black Enterprise 19, no.
10 (May 1989): 104,
321
Kevin Rodney Sullivan, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, DVD (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment,
1998).
322
Jewel Woods and Karen Hunter, Don't Blame It on Rio: The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for
Sex, 1st ed. (New York: Grand Central Publications, 2008), 12.
139 
The optimistic implication that the Caribbean is an uncomplicated paradise that
offers a romantic alternative to the hardships of black American life, however, fails to
acknowledge the potentially problematizing interactions that may occur during African
American leisure or sex tourism to Third World destinations. Poet Laureate Derek
Walcott explains, “Visitors to the Caribbean must feel that they are inhabiting a
succession of postcards. For tourists, the sunshine cannot be serious…in the unending
summer of the tropics not even poverty or poetry…seems capable of being profound.”323
As sex is often bound to this pleasure-seeking variety of travel, the counterpublic
collisions that occur when middle-class, African American men and women who engage in
romantic liaisons with less affluent blacks around the world may be predisposed to
problematizing travel discourses worthy of further academic study.
In his ethnography Don’t Blame it On Rio, author Jewel Woods suggests that
these sorts of troubling collisions also occur in Brazil, where black men have recently been
visiting in great numbers in search of sex for pay. As one black tourist explains, however,
“It’s not just Brazil. We’ll find other places. There’s Belize, Colombia, Venezuela – its any
Third World country…Before, you had to be mega wealthy in order to be able to travel
and live in another country. But now brothers are traveling and going everywhere.”324
This tourist’s observation of the increasing ease of navigating the world indicate the need
                                                        
323
Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (presented at The 1992 Nobel Lecture,
Stockholm, Sweden, December 7, 1992),
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html.
324
Woods and Hunter, Don't Blame It on Rio, 54.
140 
for future social scientific research into how counterpublic collisions may facilitate
hegemonic discourses that propagate a global black hierarchy.
D iaspora Travel outside African Am erican Com m unities
Diasporic travel as a catalyst of identity crises is not limited to African American
communities. As Gilroy reminds his reader, “It is often forgotten that the term ‘diaspora’
comes into the vocabulary of black studies and the practice of Pan-Africanist politics from
Jewish thought….The themes of escape and suffering, tradition, temporality, and the
social organization of memory have a special significance in the history of Jewish
responses to modernity.”325 These themes mimic those that thread the narratives of
contemporary black travelers and are indicative of a commonality of diasporic experience.
The identity complicating movements that define the history of African American
communities are perhaps even more complicated for Jewish Americans. For Jews living in
the United States, the path that brought them to America often involved an initial
emigration from Israel, a second life in Eastern Europe, a forced relocation to sites of
genocidal horror during the Holocaust, and an escape from this oppression to the United
States. The multitude of sites that define Jewish identity complicate notions of
“homeland” and may make the quest for Jewish roots even more elusive than those roots
that African Americans seek. Though the scope of this paper limits lengthy comparisons
between African American travel and Jewish American travel, obvious analogies may be
drawn that suggest additional inquiry into this subject is merited.

                                                        
325
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 205.
141 
Despite the fact that the sites of horror in black history also happen to be located
in African Americans’ perceived homeland, the experiences that black travelers have in
those spaces may be similar to the experiences of Jewish Americans who return to the
concentration camps in Auschwitz. As a land that displays the retention of authentic
Africanness, Brazil may be understood as the black tourist’s Israel, where the existence of
kibbutzim and strict religious practices offer Jewish travelers insight into the ways in
which Jewish life plays out in foreign spaces.326 While these analogies are complicated and
do not always match up directly, they suggest that the transformations I claim accompany
black diasporic travel need not be understood solely as an African American phenomenon.
Research by Caryn Aviv and David Schneer on group tours to Israel offered by
organizations such as Birthright may also provide a model for understanding the ways in
which traveling discourses and diasporic engagement can result in the development of
lasting political ideology transformations.327
Counterpublic Cyber-Collisions
In the article, Birth of a Digital Nation, Jon Katz argues that his study of internet
communication suggests a new form of global, transnational discourse is playing out in
cyberspace. Katz explains, “I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I
watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged
                                                        
326
Caryn Aviv and David Schneer, “Traveling Jews, Creating Memory: Eastern Europe, Israel, and the
Diaspora Business,” in Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed.
Judith Madeleine Gerson and Diane L Wolf (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 67-83.
327
Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: New York
142 
and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when
people were suddenly able to talk to one another, rather than through journalists,
politicians, or ideological mercenaries. I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of
nation.”328
While the focus of this paper has been on counterpublic collisions facilitated
through travel, black diasporic engagement may also be possible through the type of cyber
communication that Katz describes. Though the economic limitations of the internet as a
form of transnational communication must be recognized, steady improvements in global
internet accessibility may lead to future political discussions between blacks throughout
the diaspora that produce discourses as meaningful as those born from actual, physical
travel. For those African Americans who may not be able to afford a trip abroad, the
message boards, chat rooms, and blogs that emerge from foreign black spaces might offer
the next best opportunity for counterpublic collisions.
Implications
Work by Michael C. Dawson and Melissa Harris-Lacewell has established a
variety of black counterpublic spaces in which African Americans engage in conversations
on topics that contribute to the formation of political ideology. In Black Visions, Dawson
suggests that black counterpublic discourses occur through institutional interactions, and
that the deterioration of the organizational bases of black communities has put the
                                                        
328
Jon Katz, “Birth of a digital nation,” Wired 5, no. 4 (April 1997): 49,
143 
counterpublic sphere at risk.329 Harris-Lacewell’s subsequent expansion of this
counterpublic confinement is a valuable addition to the body of research on sources of
black ideology formation. Her work opens up new, everyday spaces such as barbershops
as valid discursive arenas. But Harris-Lacewell’s text is also limited in its assessment of
possible sites of counterpublic discourse. In this paper, I have argued for an even further
expansion of the definition of what amounts to a counterpublic site through the assertion
that travel abroad provides alternate spaces for black discourse.
This paper’s assessment of traveler reactions to international sites of blackness
suggests that ideology formation must be understood as an ongoing contestation of
identity that plays out through black interactions in spaces more inclusive than those
described by Dawson and Harris-Lacewell. Black travel narratives suggest that discourses
not only occur in everyday, domestic spaces, but also occur during fleeting encounters
with foreign counterpublics abroad.
The counterpublic collisions documented in this paper lead to a wide range of
political ideology complications. In Brazil, African Americans gain new strategies of global
resistance from their diasporic engagement with Afro-Brazilian cultural forms. In Ghana,
black travelers produce discourses that suggest that the transformations that black travel
produces are not always contingent upon dialogues between counterpublics. Instead,
tourism may simply result in the creation of off-stage spaces in which black counterpublics
collide with discursive arenas that inspire reflexive ideological reconsideration. While
travel to Brazil may result in African Americans gaining strength and wisdom from a
                                                        
329
Dawson, Black Visions, 36-37.
144 
foreign counterpublic, travel to Africa may result in African Americans finding a similar
strength and wisdom in themselves.
I argue that despite differences in their modes of transformation, experiences in
both Ghana and Brazil lead to similar empowerment narratives defined by distinct political
ideology complications. These fleeting encounters with foreign black counterpublics
complicate identities in ways that directly mimic the ideology formation that occurs in
Dawson and Harris-Lacewell’s counterpublic spaces. This similarity thus challenges the
prevailing understanding of counterpublic spaces and expands the counterpublic realm to
include foreign and transient discourses.
African American heritage tourism must be understood as a catalyst for unexpected
challenges to ideologies. Those who set out with goals of Pan-Africanism may find their
quest for brotherhood fruitless, but their conception of self transformed through an
engagement with personal and ancestral history. Those who set out to find Africa
preserved in the diaspora may be empowered by the resistance of Afro-Brazilians to
hegemonic oppression, but deeply disturbed by the conditions in which their black
brothers and sisters live in the Third World. The outcomes of counterpublic collisions,
regardless of what travelers expect of them, are transformative in exposing to African
Americans strategies for their political futures.
According to Scott, two theories explain how dominant ideology oppresses those
outside the dominant sphere. Scott claims either “dominant ideology works its magic by
persuading subordinated groups to believe actively in the values that explain and justify
their own subordination,” or “achieves compliance by convincing subordinate groups that
145 
the social order in which they live is natural and inevitable.”330 I argue that time spent in
Ghana and Brazil radicalizes African American travelers’ opposition to both of these forms
of domination. Through engagement with slave sites, the immoral values upon which
America was founded are exposed, inspiring ressentiment in travelers and an active
resistance to unjust subordination. Through experiences in Brazil, African Americans learn
of the ways in which blacks in the diaspora have pushed back against a racist social order
through cultural resistance. With this basis of knowledge, black travelers return to the
United States with proof that elsewhere in the diaspora, blacks are subverting the
dominant sphere’s ascribed order.
Black travelers, through their movement into spaces where black culture and
politics take on new meanings, undergo identity crises that shift their strategies for
combating oppression in America. These ideological shifts may not occur within the
confines of the United States, and they may be the result of only a temporary journey
abroad, but their inclusion in the scholarly discourse surrounding African American
political ideology formation fills in a noteworthy gap in the study of black counterpublic
spaces.
In 1968, Black Nationalist Imari Obadele argued, “For the greater part of American
history white Americans had a frontier, which, for them, continually offered the possibility
of almost limitless opportunity. Black people have never had this.”331 I contend, however,
                                                        
330
331
Imari Obadele and The Republic of New Africa, “The Anti-Depression Program of the Republic of New
Africa,” in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William L Van De Burg
(New York: New York University Press, 1997), 215-221.
146 
that for Black people, tourism grants them a frontier in which they may undergo a
contestation of identity, a reflection on previously held political strategies, and a
complication of the narrow boundaries of African American ideology. During their time on
the black frontier, African Americans are pushed into engagement with both contemporary
and historic representations of blackness, a process that opens up channels for boundless
ideological complications. Whether these complications are empowering or
problematizing, African American tourists are challenged by their travel experiences to
reorient their understanding of dominant sphere oppression.
As Kelly explains, “Politics is not separate from lived experience or the imaginary
world of what is possible; to the contrary, politics is about these things. Politics
comprises the many battles to roll back constraints and exercise some power over, or
create some space within, the institutions and social relationships that dominate our
lives.”332 For African Americans, travel on the black frontier is thus a kind of politics in
motion – it is a lived experience, a means for making sense of black life, a space to do
battle with oppression, and a tool for mobilizing blacks to “engage a prophetic discourse
about subjectivity that [is] liberatory and transformative.”333
                                                        
332
Kelley, Race Rebels, 9-10.
333
hooks, Killing Rage, 250.
147 
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Concerning the Institutional Review Board
for Human Subjects
Criteria for Exemption from Review
In a Memo issued on May 22, 2002, the Princeton University Institutional Review Panel
for Human Subjects explained, “Research including journalistic interviews, oral histories,
biographical profiles, or other forms of nonfiction narratives normally does not fall within
the jurisdiction of the IRP.” As a result, I did not pursue IRP approval and instead
followed generally accepted guidelines for conducting primary source interviews. In my
contact with African American travelers, all subjects were apprised of the nature of my
thesis and understood that they were participating in an academic study in which their
quoted opinions would be made known. To further protect these opinions, all travelers’
names assume a pseudonym. Tour guides and other persons who provide contextualizing,
informative narratives on the travel industry are identified by their real names.
(Memo obtained from Princeton Office of Research and Project Administration)
164 
A Note on the Type
This thesis is set in Princeton Monticello, a Linotype face. Monticello is modeled after a
typeface from the late 18th century by America’s first successful type foundry — Binny &
Ronaldson in Philadelphia. The typeface owes its modern incarnation to Princeton
University Press, which commissioned its design in the 1950s as a historically accurate
typeface for the publication of “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson” — accounting for the
typeface’s name. In 2003, the press commissioned renowned type designer Matthew
Carter to create a digital version of Monticello for its continued publication of Jefferson’s
papers. Princeton Monticello has a vibrancy in detail and overall character that makes it
distinctive today.
The thesis was composed, printed, and bound by Smith-Shattuck of Princeton, NJ on a

24# acid-free 100% pure cotton sheet with a smooth finish.
(Typeface history obtained from Princeton University Office of Communications)
165 
Honor Code Pledge
This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.
166 

Counterpublic Collisions: African American Travel, Diasporic Engagement, and The Impact of Transient Discourses On Political Ideology Formation

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Counterpublic Collisions:

Afri can Am eri can Trav el , Di asp ori c En g ag em en t ,

an d t h e Im p act of Tran si en t Di scou rses on

Pol i t i cal Id eol og y Form at i on

Kyle Hotchkiss Carone

A Senior Thesis presented to the Department of Politics in partial fulfillment of the

On a personal level, I owe my deepest thanks to my parents for encouraging me to write

The Traveling Counterpublic

Capoeira, Candomblé, and Carnaval: Emancipated and Problematized Spaces

Chapter Four 131

Tourism and Political Ideology Formation:

Back Matter 163

The Traveling Counterpublic

– Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (1958)

– Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (1976)

No discourse is ever a monologue.

– Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse (1985)

he history of blacks in America is a history built upon the movement of

anthropologist Renata Harden suggests, “African American identity is best understood as

ideology formation or reconsideration. What mostly exists in the academic community,

however, is a conversation largely centered on travel as it relates to issues of modernity,

fostering discourses of black resistance and liberation.

type of displaced self-reflection that significantly complements the experiences Harris-

Lacewell argues shape black ideology. Using Harris-Lacewell’s framework for

understanding black identity formation through an engagement with everyday black

interactions with foreign blackness through a diasporic counterpublic engagement.

and identity in a “terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal –

in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”6

intense inquiry into controversial conceptions of Pan-Africanism, global identity, Cultural

Nationalism, double-consciousness, and a multitude of other ideologies that African

political ideology and notions of nationhood.

Homi Bhabha, a theorist on postcolonialism, writes, “Political empowerment and

can be understood as products of diasporic engagement and counterpublic ideology

successes in relation to those in global black communities. In Brazil, interactions with

question, “Am I an American or am I a Negro?”8 Would Malcolm X, who claimed that to

I began my research by reaching out to African Americans who had recently

to discuss their experiences interacting with black communities abroad. In addition to

consulting with interview subjects, I engaged in on-sight, participatory observation in

other heritage tourism researchers identify in personal interviews.

In the psychological study, “Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging,”

share in the public domain, nonetheless.

moved them politically, I allowed my subjects to reflect on their experiences without

their travel left a lasting impression on their self identity.

unfold when African Americans arrive at their destinations.

responsible for the creation of black counterpublic spaces. Harris-Lacewell’s assessment of

Black Entertainment Television as a source of counterpublic discourse is useful in framing

own agenda that is inconsistent with travelers’ expectations and desires.12

American travel can be understood in the context of academic literature surrounding

Next, I will review depictions of African American travel in published travelogues

argument that contemporary black travels to diaspora locations should be understood as

definitive sites of counterpublic discourse.

interactions that have been historically documented in descriptions of black travel

problematic interactions are complemented, however, by empowering spaces of black

surrounding self-determination, Black Feminism, and Cultural Nationalism.

counterpublic. These interactions of black spheres inspire self-reflection and a wrestling

that reflect opposition to dominant American political discourse.

postcolonialism, philosophy, anthropology, queer theory, film, culture, sociology, identity,

interaction in the construction of African Americans’ political identities.

The Black Counterpublic

In Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Ideologies, political

scientist Michael Dawson defines the black counterpublic as a semi-autonomous space in

to Dawson’s articulation of what constitutes a responsive black counterpublic.