We Bring Home the Roots: African American Women Touring Brazil and Bearing their Nation
Patricia de Santana Pinho, Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz

The talk presents a chapter of my nearly completed book manuscript Diaspora Detours: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil. Previous chapters examine the effects of national identities on the connections between black diaspora communities. In this chapter I analyze how gender impacts these transnational relations while simultaneously differentiating the experiences of female and male travelers. Analyzing why and how women travel is important in deconstructing the implicitly masculinist abstract tourist subject. At the same time, by focusing on women travelers, it is crucial not to confirm men as the norm that goes unexamined and unquestioned. While the chapter looks more closely at women, it does so in order to examine how travel and tourism function as fundamentally gendered and embodied practices, which in turn contribute to the gendering of the black diaspora.

Patricia de Santana Pinho, Associate Professor in LALS, is a Brazilian social scientist whose research focuses on topics of blackness, whiteness, racism, anti-racism, tourism, and the black diaspora. She is author of Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press, 2010).

Feminist Studies Colloquium Series Spring 2017 Schedule:
May 4th: Doris Leibetseder, “QT Reproduction: Queen and Transgender Use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies”
May 17th: Susan O’Neal Stryker, “What Transpires Now: Transgender History and the Future We Need”
June 1st: Patricia de Santana Pinho, “We Bring Home the Roots: African American Women Touring Brazil and Bearing their Nation”