In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans)Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island

"In The Shadow of the Castle: (Trans) Nationalism, African-American Tourism, and Gorée Island" argues that the late twentieth-century "Back to Africa" discourse departs from the nineteenth-century emigrationist and mid-twentieth-century expatriate "Back to Africa" movements; the contemporary discourse predicates itself more on a commemoration of slavery's past than on creating a programmatic solution for the future and establishing an alternative homeland in an emancipated African postcolonial present. By examining the photographs from Carrie Mae Weems's "Elmina Cape Coast Ile de Goree" and Chester Higgins's "The House of Slaves at the Door of No Return," this article contends that the advent of African American heritage tourism enables post-Civil Rights African Americans to replace (and thus temporarily reconcile) their sense of exclusion from America's canonized national self-narrative with recourse to an alternative, albeit romantically imagined, Diasporic site of origin.