Mapping Diaspora

The city of Salvador has long cultivated an image as a bearer of African cultural heritage in the Americas, a “mecca,” as put famously by Eugenia Anna dos Santos, one of the women who helped shape this identity early in the twentieth century. It is this sense of Bahia as a site of pilgrimage that Patricia Pinho explores in Mapping Diaspora. Though black travelers have long engaged with Brazil, over the past several decades a particular strand of African American tourism has focused on Bahia in what Pinho identifies as a search for roots and diasporic kinship, part of a larger phenomenon of heritage tourism connecting diasporas to their ancestral homelands.The twist here, of course, is that Brazil is not a homeland for African Americans. Despite its title, Pinho's book focuses specifically on Bahia and how it emerged onto a “map of Africanness” that marks particular spaces with special historical and cultural significance in a way that is more metaphor than history. Africanity is deftly deployed in Bahia as a strategic cultural resource by people of all races. Pinho's earlier book, Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (2010), looks at the use of African heritage by black Carnival groups and fits with scholarship by Scott Ickes and Anadelia Romo that reveals that what appears (and is often presented) as African retentions is actually a series of choices. Bahia markets its Africanness through iconic cultural expressions—most notably, capoeira, candomblé, and the costumed women (baianas) who have come to represent the state itself. When African Americans began organizing tours to Bahia in the 1970s, they projected meanings and desires that created their own sense of Bahia within an imagined global African world. Pinho argues that these African Americans, largely of the Black Power generation, had typically sought reconnection with their African heritage through travel to the Continent. Bahia emerged as an alternative that provided “a closer, and cozier, version of Africa in the Americas where it is possible to reconnect with the ‘past’ without having to deal with the painful memory of slavery” (p. 60).This is one of three defining ways that Bahia is constituted in the African American imaginary. Pinho argues that tourists also reproduce a version of the “happy native” trope in hypervalorizing the restorative power of African heritage for diasporic peoples. Finally, her interviewees frequently framed Brazil's current initiatives on affirmative action and political representation as a stage in black political advancement long since achieved in the United States, establishing an evolutionary linearity with implicit hierarchies of development reinforced by the notion of Bahia as a “living museum” of African traditions, as Romo has discussed. Pinho argues that these three attributes make African American heritage tourism more like traditional ethnic tourism, which seeks out the exotic “Other” (p. 9). Though heritage tourism is distinct in its quest to find sameness and kinship, Pinho contends these two apparently opposite forms of tourism are nonetheless “both sustained by a Western gaze that represents the inhabitants of tourist destinations as living in the past” (p. 95).These asymmetries are not lost on Pinho's travelers, whose visits unfailingly included meeting and supporting black organizations and individuals. This is an essential element of their tours, providing an opportunity to dialogue directly with Afro-Brazilians and ostensibly experience the real Brazil. Pinho notes other efforts to leverage their privilege on behalf of Afro-Brazilians, such as occupying tacitly segregated spaces and insisting on working with black professionals, that have had tangible impact. Because Pinho focuses on how heritage tourism embodies and reproduces consumerism and geopolitical disparities, readers may not fully appreciate the sincerity with which these tourists are attempting to overcome these constraints, as evident in the nuanced quotes throughout the book. Though both the tourists and Afro-Bahians benefit in distinct ways from these highly curated encounters, Pinho reveals the many factors that problematize the dialogue.A chapter considers the gender dynamics for these tour groups, whose main clients are women over 50. Especially given the work of Erica Williams on the gendered and raced nature of sex tourism in Bahia, which has some overlaps with roots tourism, Pinho could have brought more nuance to this chapter. Yet her observations about how age and gender steer certain travelers toward more scripted encounters are worth noting. Overall, she finds, gender alone does not fundamentally shift their disparate positionality as American tourists.Following a final chapter on the role of official state tourism agencies, Pinho pivots to Brazil's 2016 political crisis in an epilogue on current concerns not typically on the agenda of the vacationing tourist. She notes other forms of diasporic encounters underway that deal with these tougher realities, such as the outreach between activists working to end antiblack violence.The questions that Pinho raises about negotiating the disjunctures of diaspora are important contributions to both Brazilian and diaspora studies. Her focus on the idealized type of tourism that Bahia has nurtured complements work by such scholars as Keisha-Khan Perry, Erica Williams, and Christen Smith on the violences and silencing necessary to produce such an experience. Though some may argue that Bahia is overstudied, it is exciting to see that depth of scholarship inform ever more sophisticated research

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