1st Edition

African Homecoming Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage

By Katharina Schramm Copyright 2010
    319 Pages
    by Routledge

    319 Pages
    by Routledge

    African Americans and others in the African diaspora have increasingly “come home” to Africa to visit the sites at which their ancestors were enslaved and shipped. In this nuanced analysis of homecoming, Katharina Schramm analyzes how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced among African hosts and Diasporan returnees and at the same time contested in practice. She examines the varying interpretations and appropriations of significant sites (e.g. the slave forts), events (e.g. Emancipation Day) and discourses (e.g. repatriation) in Ghana to highlight these dynamics. From this, she develops her notions of diaspora, home, homecoming, memory and identity that reflect the complexity and multiple reverberations of these cultural encounters beyond the sphere of roots tourism.

    Foreword by Beverley Butler Prologue: Confronting the Past (Richard Wright) 1 Introduction: Homecoming and the Ambivalence of Belonging 2 The Layout of an Ideology: Claiming the African Heritage in Early Panafricanism 3 Early Connections: Ghana's Independence 4 History Cast in Stone: Representing the Slave Trade at Ghana's Forts and Castles 5 Confronting the Past: Touring Cape Coast Castle 6 Pilgrimage Tourism: Homecoming as a Spiritual Journey 7 Emancipation Day: A Route to Understanding Homecoming 8 "The Re-Emergence of African Civilization": Claiming a Common Heritage In PANAFEST 9 Pan-Africanism as a Ressource: Contested Relationships of Belonging in the Practice of Homecoming 10 Conclusion References Index About the Author

    Biography

    Katharina Schramm is a lecturer in anthropology at the Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the Free University in Berlin. She has written a number of articles on issues of tourism, memory and race. She is co-editor of Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (Berghahn, 2009). Her current research focuses on the interface between diaspora-identity, new genetics and citizenship.