Everybody who is interested in the routes that are followed in the search of roots, an essential part of the making and unmaking of Black identities, ought to read Mapping Diaspora. Patricia Pinho's book is the outcome of a welcome combination of research spread out over a number of years and personal reflection by a scholar who moved from Bahia to the United States and now looks back to her city of origin with a mixture of detachment and intimacy. After an introduction engaging especially the study of tourism, Chapter 1 contextualises African-American roots tourism in Brazil. The construction of Afro-Brazil from outside, especially from the United States, as a present in the past – as roots are often a referral to a mostly simpler and more genuine past – is the topic of Chapter 2. The focus of Chapter 3 is the sociology of roots tourism in Brazil, with special attention to the dynamics of soul-searching in Bahia – one of the Blackest states of the Brazilian Federation. Chapter 4 focuses on women, who make up about 75 per cent of ethnic tourists in Brazil and are also the overwhelming majority of those interested in genetic history through DNA tests. By the way, the overuse of genetic history in the United States and the relative lack of it in Brazil is not just yet another point of difference in our systems of race relations; it also shows that the DNA is a global icon with local meaning. Chapter 5 deals with the period in which the State of Bahia, from 2002 to the present, has worked hard, albeit often clumsily, at the transformation of Bahia African heritage into a bonus for tourism and sustainable development in general − heritage to be preserved as well as shown and, whenever possible, sold. In this process the state has discovered diaspora or ethnic tourism as a positive catchphrase and imagines it as a magnet for African-American tourism. Such a discovery, tragically, is not part of a plan to develop internal tourism – which, in a country the size of Brazil, would be quintessential – and promote local visitation to the growing number of recognised heritage sites associated with either slavery or Afro-Bahia culture. Such a plan is still wanting. In the epilogue, Pinho shows how the attitude to African-American tourists in Brazil has changed over time: from discarded to attractive. She also points to the close relationship between national politics and the image of Brazil as racial paradise, hell or purgatory. Under the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) government (2002–15), powerful investment in the reduction of extreme and durable (racial) inequalities had contributed to making Brazil an interesting country for its experiment with affirmative action. Under Bolsonaro's ultra-right government, Brazil's international image has, alas, moved again in the direction of a racial hell.

This book is the welcome outgrowth of Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press, 2010) and explores the phenomenon of roots tourism in a country that has seen the transformation of Africa as a trope from onus to bonus – of course in a process full of contradictions. It is a good companion to Anadelia Romo's Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) on the living museum in which Afro-Bahia has been transformed; and Scott Ickes’ careful description in African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil (University of Florida Press, 2013) of how the local elites, from the 1930s, little by little, have accepted and even praised the African origin of ‘our people’. Pinho's book is nicely written and full of good insights, such as the description of how Rio is ‘too similar’ to the United States, or it is not exotic enough, or when roots tourists explain why they prefer Bahia to Africa: going to Africa is like visiting your grandma's house, you do not feel it is yours (p. 79). In Brazil you can mingle. Bahia is a closer Africa. It is easier to identify with it than with Africa. Pinho shows correctly how the encounters generated by roots tourism are grounded in asymmetry – it is a very eschewed and unjust mirror game. She stresses that it is the geopolitics of knowledge that has enabled African-American tourists to discover and, at the same time, take pride in places abroad (p. 105). As a scholar based in Bahia, I wonder what the consequences of this staging of Africanness or Africanisms are, from within and outside, for the production of knowledge on race relations and Black culture in Bahia. Such a roots-tourist gaze heavily affects the self-image of many people, especially the overwhelming majority of Black and Brown people – approximately 85 per cent of the city population. What does it mean to live in a city of 4 million people, one of the most violent in Brazil, with a huge homicide rate, where alegría (happiness) is supposed to be everywhere? Being sulky seems to be impossible for a true bahiano! A poor and violent city that is, however, rich in culture, Salvador da Bahia might be compared to the equally Black Cartagena or possibly the theatre society of Bali – both locations where the external/tourist gaze was influential in the actual making of local culture. Yet, ironically, the sustainability of any heritage site in Bahia also depends on tourism, I would say especially foreign tourism – because of our coloniality, the ideal tourist is the foreign one, especially the (White or Black) American ‘five star’ tourist.

The book explores in original ways the thin line between transnational Black solidarity, the civilising mission and ethnocentrism or the outright US-centred perspective on emancipation from racism. This is a very important topic and must also be scrutinised from the huge periphery of the Black Atlantic, such as coastal Brazil, Cape Verde, Liberia, the Bight of Benin, urban South Africa or coastal Colombia. These are all locations with a long history of interaction with African-Americans and the funds and programmes that made such exchanges possible: missions and missionaries, educational projects inspired by the Tuskegee model, the music and film industry, but also the Phelps Stokes Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Peace Corps, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), Ford Foundation, Fulbright, etc. Black ethnic tourism and its inherent soul-searching take place in a context that is already permeated by networks and flows of resources that, while emancipatory and liberating in principle, have often contributed to fostering coloniality as regards the United States in the periphery of the Black Atlantic. More generally, tensions between centres and peripheries of transnational political projects have existed in many international political projects such as socialist internationalism, global feminism and LGBT activism, but also in more ethnically connoted projects like Zionism and pan-Arabism. These projects also establish a political centre (often represented as the ideal future) and peripheries (often represented as the past or backward). The gaze produced by these projects, that are meant to be empowering, can thus, alas, result in disempowerment. The picture the book sketches is neither uniform nor dull. In many ways African-American tourists contribute somewhat positively to Afro-Brazilian activities deployed by artists and entrepreneurs. The sheer fact of being inspired by the notion of buying Black and expecting to be tended by Black tourist guides has a positive outcome in Bahia. The pursuit of Black solidarity, however, can also have oppressive, patronising and infantilising outcomes. For instance, often ethnic tourists prefer to take Afro-Bahia culture ‘in pills’: highly visual, condensed and quickly intelligible – not much reflection is to be expected. Pinho adds a wealth of interesting data on how being able to travel across borders, in a world were tickets and visas are just for the few, is in itself an act of power that, ironically, can empower those who are subaltern in their own country, such the African-American minority in the United States. For scholars of Afro-Brazilian cultures and identities, roots tourism and the relationship between travel and Black identity formation, Mapping Diaspora is thus a must-read. I only have one minor remark to add. From such a critical scholar as Pinho, I would have expected more consideration for local scholars. I would have liked her to be as careful with quoting local scholars as she has been regarding scholars based in the United States – all of them referred to. This is just a small example of how easy it is to unwarily contribute to the re-establishment of the subaltern status of scholarship in the Global South of the Black Atlantic.