Professor Patricia Pinho’s 2018 publication, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil, for the University of North Carolina Press, traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn to Bahia, the state that previously absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African Americans have become frequent travelers across what Pinho calls the “map of Africanness” that connects diasporic communities and stimulates transnational solidarities while simultaneously exposing the unevenness of the black diaspora. Roots tourism, according to Pinho, is a fertile site to examine the tensions between racial and national identities as well as the gendered dimensions of travel, particularly when women are the major roots-seekers.