Patricia de Santana Pinho, associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has produced an informative look at African American tourism to Bahia, Brazil. Such travel, she explains, is best described as roots tourism, a subset of the broader category of diaspora tourism, because the travelers undertake it in search of Africanness. Among the broader issues that she examines in her study of organized tours to Bahia are the shaping of identities through tourism, the development of black solidarity across national boundaries, and the geopolitics of a black diaspora, disputing most scholars’ assumptions that tourism acts as a force for inequity. To support her contentions she gathers a wealth of information from a wide variety of sources, including but not limited to questionnaires, travel brochures, tour guides, and government officials.

Following an account of the rise of African American tourism in Brazil and...

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