num_pages: 320
description: A decade in the making Emily Raboteaus Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one womans quest for a place to call home and an investigation into a peoples search for the Promised Land this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.At the age of twenty-three award-winning writer Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong Raboteau could not yet say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines shed 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. Shed heard about it on Bob Marleys Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. Now in Israel the Jewish Zion she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus Raboteau sought out other black communities that left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is same she asks have you found the home youre looking for?On her ten-year journey back in time and around the globe through the Bush years and into the age of Obama Raboteau wanders to 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 familypeople that have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with historical and cultural investigation 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 .
language: English
title: Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora
publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press