Description:
This ethnography critically analyzes the travel of diaspora Africans to Ghana by considering its cultural and political economic meanings for hosts, guests, and intermediaries. Reed highlights how tensions inherent in promoting heritage travel alternatively as tourism or as pilgrimage have profound implications for economic development and reclaiming an African identity.
Review Quotes:
"Through seven wonderfully crafted chapters, anthropologist Reed begins to explain the emerging phenomenon of slavery heritage tourism among visitors to Ghana. Using case studies and field-based research, the author does an excellent job of balancing qualitative and quantitative data to tell the story of residents and tourists involved with the phenomenon. Readers cannot help but feel they are part of the story told in Cape Coast, Ghana, as the words on the page come to life through numerous somber vignettes. This text would be ideal for libraries with a collection specializing in cultural heritage tourism and anthropology. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -K. M. Woosnam, Texas A&M University in CHOICE
"In addressing issues of identity, belonging, memory, and history in the heritage industry in Ghana, Ann Reed's Pilgrimage Tourism of Diaspora Africans to Ghana makes a substantial contribution to current academic debates about diaspora, globalization, heritage tourism, and memory. This is an important book that deserves to be widely read." - Mattia Fumanti, University of St. Andrews, in American Anthropologist