Bate Papo Series: O olhar do turista afro-americano sobre o Brasil--A discussion with Patricia de Santana Pinho, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at SUNY Albany

Brazil has increasingly become a travel destination for African American tourists interested in African culture and seeking to engage with other black communities in the diaspora. But how has this specific tourist gaze been shaped? What sources have informed the construction of this particular view of the country? Analyzing the dominant African American tourist gaze on Brazil, Patricia de Santana Pinho demonstrates how tourism publicity geared to African Americans has represented Bahia as abounding with cultural roots and Africanness, in contrast to Caribbean destinations which have predominantly been portrayed as sites where one travels for fun, sun, sand, and sex. Pinho looks at these seemingly opposite representations as constituting a “map of Africanness” where the meanings of the different places visited by African American tourists are hierarchically connected.

Patricia de Santana Pinho is an anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on the topics of blackness, whiteness, racism, and forms of resistance to racism in Brazil, and more broadly in Latin America. She is the author of Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press, 2010). Her current research project examines African American roots tourism in Brazil within the wider context of transnational black links of solidarity.

The Bate-Papo is a series of informal meetings of students, scholars, and invited guests to discuss issues of broad contemporary interest. Conversations will be primarily in Portuguese, but accessible to beginning Portuguese students.