Rhizomorphics of race and space - Ghana's slave castles and the roots of African diaspora identity

This article discusses the slave-holding forts and castles erected on the coast of West Africa between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues for their centrality in conceptualizing race as a maker and marker of modern, transnational American identity. It reconfigures Paul Gilroy's notion of "fractal" and "rhizomorphic" structure of the Black Atlantic to cast the castles as a collective architectural monument to centuries-long cultural exchanges between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. By linking these sites to recent "roots" tourism, it also demonstrates their continued vitality to mapping the history and theory of African diasporic spaces in the United States.