African Americans and others in the African diaspora have increasingly “come home” to Africa to visit the sites at which their ancestors were enslaved and shipped. In this nuanced analysis of homecoming, Katharina Schramm analyzes how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced among African hosts and Diasporan returnees and at the same time contested in practice. She examines the varying interpretations and appropriations of significant sites (e.g. the slave forts), events (e.g. Emancipation Day) and discourses (e.g. repatriation) in Ghana to highlight these dynamics. From this, she develops her notions of diaspora, home, homecoming, memory and identity that reflect the complexity and multiple reverberations of these cultural encounters beyond the sphere of roots tourism.

African Americans and others in the African diaspora have increasingly “come home” to Africa to visit the sites at which their ancestors were enslaved and shipped. In this nuanced analysis of homecoming, Katharina Schramm analyzes how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced among African hosts and Diasporan returnees and at the same time contested in practice. She examines the varying interpretations and appropriations of significant sites (e.g. the slave forts), events (e.g. Emancipation Day) and discourses (e.g. repatriation) in Ghana to highlight these dynamics. From this, she develops her notions of diaspora, home, homecoming, memory and identity that reflect the complexity and multiple reverberations of these cultural encounters beyond the sphere of roots tourism.

Summoned from the Margin tells the story of Lamin Sanneh's fascinating journey from his upbringing in an impoverished village in West Africa to education in the United States and Europe to a distinguished career teaching at the Universities of Yale, Harvard, Aberdeen, and Ghana. He grew up in a polygamous household in The Gambia and attended a government-run Muslim boarding school. A chance encounter with Helen Keller's autobiography taught him that education and faith are the key to overcoming physical and personal hardship and inspired his journey. Burning theological questions about God's nature and human suffering eventually led Sanneh to convert from Islam to Christianity and to pursue a career in academia. Here he recounts the unusually varied life experiences that have made him who he is today. Watch the trailer:

An illustrated history of African-American farmers, Homecoming is a requiem for a way of life that has almost disappeared. Based on the film Homecoming, produced for the Independent Television Service with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The videocassette of Homecoming is available from California Newsreel at www.newsreel.org.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

The story of one woman's unflagging efforts to recover the history of her ancestors, slaves who had lived and worked at Somerset Place plantation.

Saints in Exile studies, from an insider's perspective, the worship practices and social ethics of the African American family of Holiness, Pentecostal, and Apostolic churches known collectively as the Sanctified Church. Cheryl Sanders identifies the theme of exile, both as an idea and an experience, as the key to understanding the dialectical nature of African American religious and intellectual life, that W.E.B. Du Bois called "double-conscious." Sanders's saints in exile are a people who see themselves as "in the world but not of it"; their marginalized status is both self-imposed and involuntary, a consequence of racism, sexism and other forms of elitism. When joined with the biblical tropes of homecoming and reconciliation, the concept of exile serves as a vital vantage point from which to identify, critique, and remedy the continued alienation of blacks, women, and the poor in the United States. Sanders's interpretive approach clarifies many paradoxical features of black existence, especially the peculiar interplay of the sacred and the secular in African American song, speech, and dance. She particularly scrutinizes gospel music, a product of the Sanctified worship tradition that has had a significant influence on popular culture. Saints in Exile goes further than any previous study in illuminating the African American experience; it will be welcomed by scholars and students of American religion, African American studies, and American History.