| Summary: |
This paper explores 'roots tourism' as a diasporic identity practice. Drawing on accounts of voyages made by members of several different diasporic populations, I demonstrate that attention to individual tourist experience reveals a subjective focus on the sensing body as a key component of touristic 'return' to ancestral homelands. Through sensory engagement with their physical surroundings, travelers undertake commemorative practices that somatically and imaginatively unite them with their forebears, thus bridging the diasporic rupture of past and present, ancestors and selves, homeland and exile.
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