{"id":27580,"date":"2013-01-15T16:36:02","date_gmt":"2013-01-15T16:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=27580"},"modified":"2017-03-30T12:37:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T12:37:58","slug":"searching-for-zion-the-quest-for-home-in-the-african-diaspora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=27580","title":{"rendered":"Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora"},"content":{"rendered":"

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Grove\/Atlantic<\/a>
\nJanuary 2013
\n320 pages
\n6×9
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8021-2003-8
\neBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9379-7<\/p>\n

Emily Raboteau<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau\u2019s Searching for Zion<\/em> takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman\u2019s quest for a place to call \u201chome\u201d and an investigation into a people\u2019s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.<\/p>\n

At twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau couldn\u2019t say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she\u2019d never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of Zion as a place black people yearned to be. She\u2019d heard about it on Bob Marley\u2019s Exodus<\/em> and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. In Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is the same she asks herself: have you found the home you\u2019re looking for?<\/p>\n

On her journey back in time and across the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau visits Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family\u2014people who have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit.<\/p>\n

With Searching for Zion<\/em>, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau\u2019s “Searching for Zion” takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman\u2019s quest for a place to call \u201chome\u201d and an investigation into a people\u2019s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,395,11,3601,8,15,820,394],"tags":[2358,13382,5074],"class_list":["post-27580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-autobiography","category-books","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-novels","category-religion","category-socialscience","tag-emily-raboteau","tag-groveatlantic","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27580"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53065,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27580\/revisions\/53065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}