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(Re)constructing Roots: Genetics and the ‘Return’ of African Americans to Ghana

Abstract Based on a study of African Americans who have undertaken DNA testing in order to trace their (African) ancestral roots, it is argued that tracing genetic ancestry affects notions of identity, home and belonging, and might serve as a motivating factor for actual or desired travels to, or even resettlement in, a newly discovered ancestral homeland. The paper explores how identity becomes renegotiated and reconceptualised through narratives of imagined ties to a perceived long-lost ‘homeland’. Such narratives often assist in bridging the narrator’s life in the US with that of a ‘reconstructed homeland’ through (new kinds of) transnational narratives of belonging.