“Roots, the Legacy of Slavery, and Civil Rights Backlash in 1970s America.” In Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson (eds.) Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017, 25-46 (original) (raw)

Alex Haley's Roots: A Tale of Search Against Uprootedness

2013

, a famous American biographer, scriptwriter and novelist published his most famous and historical novel ROOTS in the year 1976. He did something no black person had been able to do before: he got Americans to view history from a black perspective. The vehicle he used was 'ROOTS: The Saga of an American Family' his 688 page fictional interpretation of the genealogy of his family beginning with a kidnapped African boy brought to the United States as a slave in the mid-1700's. Haley traced in it his ancestry back to Africa and covered seven American generations, starting from his African ancestor, Kunta Kinte. 'ROOTS' touches the pulse that how alike we human beings are when we get down to the bottom beneath these man-imposed differences Thus ROOTS is an example of a man's sudden uprootedness from his motherland, from his culture. The suffering, pain and agony that he goes through and it speaks about the untiring struggle for his existence. Alex Haley, a famous American biographer, scriptwriter and novelist published his most famous and historical novel ROOTS in the year 1976. He did something no black person had been able to do before: he got Americans to view history from a black perspective. The vehicle he used was 'ROOTS: The Saga of an American Family' his 688 page fictional interpretation of the genealogy of his family beginning with a kidnapped African boy brought to the United States as a slave in the mid-1700's. It became an immediate bestseller for this book had given African-Americans their sense of identify; he had given them a history. It is worth repeating the subtitle of the book, 'The Saga of an American Family', for it demonstrates that Haley was trying to make a broad statement about everyone's roots, not just those of African-Americans, and no doubt he struck a chord. As Alex Haley once stated-"Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people." It was as if the entire country was having an identity crisis and readers of any race could better understand their own lives through the multi-generational saga Haley had written. Haley traced in it his ancestry back to Africa and covered seven American generations, starting from his African ancestor, Kunta Kinte. 'ROOTS' touches the pulse that how alike we human beings are when we get down to the bottom beneath these man-imposed differences. He emphasized on the point that in every place there lives three group of people; first are those we could see walking around, eating, sleeping and working. Second are the ancestors-"And the third people-who are they?"asked Kunta. "The third people, "said Omoro, "are those waiting to be born." These lines clearly state the triumph of meaninglessness of existence by experiencing Kinte's recognition in the deep roots and bonds of culture and relationships. As the color of an

'The Same but a Step Removed’: Aspects of the British Reception of Roots

This chapter explores aspects of the British reception of the television version of Roots. The mini-series has been discussed and viewed within Britain in ways which, although not radically dissimilar, are different to American debates and perceptions. The British reception of Roots initially polarized between mainstream media commentary and less publicly visible " black British " engagements with the Roots phenomenon. 1 In this chapter, I explore the terms of that polarization, focusing in particular on a range of black British responses to Roots, an issue television scholars have not previously investigated. As I will demonstrate, Roots' multi-dimensional resonance among black British audiences has had, over time, as much, if not more, staying power than the predominant, limiting framework utilised in most newspaper and magazine discussions of the mini-series when it was first broadcast in Britain. Mainstream British media commentary, when Roots was first broadcast, was generally couched in the guise of a relatively distanced,

Long past slavery: representing race in the Federal Writers’ Project

Slavery & Abolition, 2017

Of all the Federal Arts Projects set up as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was, in the words of one contemporary, the 'ugly duckling' (p. 35). As Catherine Stewart notes in her fascinating book, the American public looked on with scepticism as unemployed writers, academics and sundry whitecollar 'boondogglers' were removed from relief rolls and set to work producing copy on the history and culture of the United States. One of the many branches of the FWP was the Ex-Slave Project. Conceived in 1937, this initiative saw scores of interviewers dispatched across 17 states to gather life histories from the rapidly diminishing number of formerly enslaved African Americans. Two years later, over 2,300 interviews were sent to the Library of Congress, where they remain a monument to oral history and its ability to rescue the voices of the marginalised. The New Social Historians of the 1970s were quick to grasp the value of the Ex-Slave Project; indeed, when Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll was published in 1974, readers were treated to over 600 references to FWP interviews.(1) Yet, as primary material, the interviews are far from unproblematic. In 1940, Benjamin Botkin, the FWP's recently appointed folklore editor, composed a memorandum adumbrating the shortcomings of the interviews as historical evidence: the interviewers, he warned, were amateur, their informants senescent and, in translating recollections from word to page, 'much of the scent as well as the sense' was lost (p. 237). Passing the buck somewhat, the Harvard-educated academic decided that their historical value was a Gordian knot best 'left to the scholars' to untangle (p. 237). In the eight decades since Botkin penned this memorandum, however, critical consensus on the interviews has remained elusive. Many historians have noted that, because most of the FWP interviewers were white, African-American interviewees would have felt constrained by racial mores to downplay negative memories of slavery, resulting in rosy recollections of interracial bonhomie. Nevertheless, for historians seeking to reconstruct the lived experience of the enslaved, the interviews remain a crucial, if compromised, source of evidence. Long Past Slavery strikes out from this debate in an important new direction. Rather than approaching the FWP interviews as sources of social history, Stewart uses them to illuminate the racial politics of the 1930s. The FWP, she argues, should be approached as a site of contested meaning, within which competing parties struggled to inscribe divergent representations of African-American identity onto the nation's consciousness. According to Stewart, debate over the place of African Americans within the body politic intensified during

Afrocentrism and Resistance in Roots

Roots, by Alex Haley, one of the most famous African American slave narratives, has, over time, been critiqued more as a historical text than a literary and creative extension of the African American people. In addition, the tenet of Afrocentricism in the novel has been grossly misrepresented. The research examines the inherent exegesis of Afrocentricism vis-à-vis the notion of Resistance, which constitutes a core thematic precoccupation in the novel and which expurgates the nuances of extremist Afrocentricism. Premised on these two sub-tenets of postcolonialism, this study addresses the complexity of identity construction in the novel. It demonstrates that Afrocentricism and Resistance foreground the sure-fire import of Roots among other collective bodies of African American literature that aptly respond to the theme of slavery, its aftermaths, and identity reconstruction. It reaffirms the position of Roots as a canonical literary text which also explicitly projects the tune of liberal Afrocentricism as a crucial step towards identity reconstruction among Africans and people from African descent; the debate of liberal Afrocentricism as a viable roadmap to self-discovery; and a physical and psychological rebirth that accentuates the success tale of African American people. It contends that the total emancipation of the African and African American societies lies mainly in the consistent search for both individual and collective identity through a continuous introspect into their past. It concludes that liberal Afrocentricism remains the rational roadmap to understanding Roots, against the backdrop of critics that have misrepresented as well as undermined the legendary import of the novel as a definitive African American literary canon.

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South

The Southern Literary Journal, 2008

Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them.-J. W. C. Pennington Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history-and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history.. .. Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126). These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the