Becoming Worldly: Developing Global Cosmopolitan Perspectives On Diasporic Homeland Tours

Diasporic tourism—structured group tours to natal, symbolic and ancestral homelands—is a growing industry where globalization, migration, leisure and the symbolic economy converge. Using ethnographic material from three diasporic tourist populations, this article examines the process of narrating a collective selfhood through diasporic homeland tourism. While tourists travel through space to homelands in order to travel through time and discover ancestry, they also move in scale by claiming membership in a global community. Framed within the theoretical intersection of tourism and diaspora, this comparative project reveals the utility of cosmopolitanism—as a category of practice—for domestic displays of identity and community.