This volume presents a cultural history of Alex Haley’s Roots as a case study in ‘operational acts of identification.’ It examines the strategy and tactics Haley employed in developing a family origin story into an acclaimed national history. Where cultural studies scholars have critiqued notions of sacrosanct ‘rootedness,’ this book shows the fruit of critically identifying those claims. It reframes the concept of ‘roots’ as a theoretical vocabulary and grammar for the anthropology of scriptures – a way of parsing the cultural texts that seem to read us back. Identifying Roots invites scholars of religion to reimagine their place in the humans sciences. Theorizing from a tradition of African American interventions in the history of religion, Richard Newton registers the social dramas and dynamic rhetoric that render the cultural logic of scriptures powerful. Creatively marshaling intellectual history, ethnographic autobiography, Close Reading and discourse analysis, Newton enumerates the consequences for signifying people and cultural texts as intrinsically significant. More than an investigation into Alex Haley’s legacy, Identifying Roots unearths the politics of beginnings and belongings.

Identifying Roots begins by pressing the need for more critical ways of studying scriptures and identity. It establishes these discourses as mutually informed by introducing select non-fiction vignettes in which Americans—black and white— articulate their position in the nation through Alex Haley’s Roots. I explain how approaching either concept as static phenomena occludes our ability to understand the signifying activities at play. This calls for what I introduce as an anthropology of scriptures, in which the object of study is (1) how human beings form and are formed by cultural texts and (2) the processes that efface their construction and advance their users’ agendas. I contend that in examining Alex Haley’s Roots, we observe scriptures’ entanglement with identity, or as Jean-Francois Bayart remarks, “operational acts of identification.”Too frequently, scholars adopt insider justifications for the study of a cultural text. Arbitrary claims about originality, popularity, quality, and precision betray the privileging of a community’s evaluative measures, as do assertions of derivation, insignificance, inferiority, and inaccuracy. Cultural criticism must instead analyze how and why people identify with texts. It investigates what is at stake in classifying the phenomena and winning contests over meaning. While Deleuze and Guattari are correct in representing humans routing through a rhizome of signifying practices, the anthropology of scriptures foregrounds why people nevertheless grasp for roots. Identifying Roots reads Alex Haley’s work as a case study in order to develop a language to articulate these power dynamics. I connect my efforts to three particular conversations—the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, the Society for Comparative Research in Iconic and Performative Texts, and Culture on the Edge. After summarizing the chapters of the book, I invite the reader to identify scriptures as roots, the living narratives by which humans know and are known. Ultimately their significance exceeds any one individual, including their author-ities. And since they help us survive the human condition, we will do almost anything to protect them. The chapters that follow document the lengths humans go to do so.

In this intellectual biography, I draw upon Haley’s written correspondence to highlight history and writing as pivotal tools in working out issues of race. I contend that Haley was attuned to this facet of modernity and exploited it accordingly. Roots represents a claim to solidify Haley’s own rootedness in Post Civil Rights America. The chapter begins by situating Alex Haley within the modern West, and more specifically, the Black Atlantic. His formation in the tradition of black uplift was reinforced by his family’s relative wealth, education, and status. Specifically, Haley’s interest in historiography—the writing of historical moments—aided his relative success with integration: first, as Chief Journalist for the United States Coast Guard during WWII; second as a renown reporter of iconic black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Acclaim in these positions afforded him the opportunity to work collegially with whites in an era of high racial tensions. This tension comes to the fore in his relationship with Malcolm X. While both black men were striving to negotiate the legacy of Jim Crow, Haley’s Southern, rural, Christian integrationist sensibility stood in contrast to that of the urban, Muslim, black nationalist’s rhetoric. Nevertheless, their partnership was mutually beneficial. Haley’s journalism connections and reputation gave Malcolm access to America’s mainstream readership. In return, Haley witnessed the appeal of Malcolm’s Afro-consciousness—which would be of later use in his own approach to racial politics. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (1965) epitomized their agreement that a richer testament to black life could improve race relations in America Even still, this collaboration is a site of inter- and intra-racial contest. Haley used his editorial privilege to characterize Malcolm as a cautionary tale for those whites who rejected integration and those blacks tempted by black nationalism. The premeditated murder of Malcolm X only furthered Haley’s case, making the slain figure’s story the perfect preface for an integrationist apology. In a novel preliminarily titled Before This Anger, Haley planned to recount his family’s ability to negotiate racism though hard work and faith in the American Dream—contra the critiques leveled by people like Malcolm X. The coup de grace to Malcolm X’s lingering appeal would be certitude about ancestral roots, the X-factor that so many blacks lacked. Haley’s own genealogical odyssey became a search for Roots. It presented historical proof of why his family was better (off) than so many others. Haley’s contest and collegiality with Malcolm X illustrate how identity formation never happens in isolation, but within larger systems of identification.

The second chapter continues with an intellectual biography of Haley’s deliberate construction of an American scripture. The ensuing media spectacle insisted that subsequent tellings of American history would be incomplete without serious consideration of the African American experience. At the same time, Haley’s odyssey was marred by familial strain and challenges to his historiographic authority. In studying Haley, we observe that identity politics manifest around both ends (i.e. rootedness) and means (i.e. Roots). Although Roots showcased familial knowledge as the sine qua non of his prodigious lineage, Haley went to great lengths to credential his story with institutional bona fides. He appealed to anthropologist Jan Vansina, US and British museums, the Gambian foreign ministry, and a supposed-Mandinka griot to justify his ancestral claim to a historicized Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka man who was taken from Gambia to the New World in 1767. While Haley’s family saga professes the power of knowing one’s roots, it also concedes the need to prove one’s rootedness to others. Haley set himself apart by reaching audiences unengaged by traditional barons of history. For blacks, Roots was a version of a myth that elders had long spoke of but could never prove. Haley touted the ability to verify it. For whites, it reconciled America’s love of freedom with the conspicuous presence of slavery’s progeny. The nation could rest assured—with Haley as proof—that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were available to people on both sides of the color line. The televised miniseries captivated blacks and whites with its rehearsal of star-spangled commonplaces in a new African American vernacular. The best-selling novel and record-breaking television program entered more homes than the literati had ever dreamed. Haley’s rise to stardom was a calculated risk. The research trips and promotional lectures used to curry interest came at the expense of his own familial life. A costly divorce, alimony payments, and back taxes raised the stakes of his project. And after Roots became a multimedia phenomenon, professional historians, journalists, literary critics, and lawyers scrutinized Haley’s claims. The national hero fell into authorial obscurity. Yet what differentiates scriptures from mere texts is that their audacious claims of identity are so mediated in the modes of cultural production (such as history and writing) that their importance no longer rests in the liminality of authorship. Roots was too entwined with America’s post-racial triumph to be untangled; his history, too pivotal to be troubled by facts. Roots became the inspiration for monuments across the United States. And Americans still conjure the works’ acclaimed essence through new means—such as Henry Louis Gates’ celebrity genealogy television show, Finding One’s Roots and the History Channel’s 2016 remake of Roots. Most ubiquitous is the widely-applied syllogism of “knowing one’s roots” in American speech. Haley’s work continues to live on in allusions acknowledged and unacknowledged alike.

This third chapter presents a Close Reading of Roots: the Saga of an American Family. Rather that passing itself off as a window into “the historical Haley,” my analysis approaches Haley as a master of historiography who describes—and in turn, prescribes— an understanding of how identity works in America. I use grounded theory to parse his inflections of rootedness as a process of uproot, routing, and taking root in a social context. I begin by locating Haley’s use of the root metaphor within a complex history of African American cultural expression. Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frederick Douglass, among others, reference roots as symbols of agency against the involuntary presence of blacks in America. Historical work by Yvonne Chrieau underscores that roots provided the New World material for Old World conjure traditions to exist in the diaspora. But the valence of genealogy is not nearly as “natural” or “native” as African Americans presume. A discussion of rootedness must also take into account the Western fetish of origination as presented in mathematics and philosophy. Haley’s post hoc reflections presuppose recognition of a vast semantic range. Even the must reductive ludics are the product of creolization. Haley uses frame story to present the roots discourse as a solution to America’s racial problems. He acknowledges that in the year of the novel’s publication, 1976, de jure integration had yet to take place. This provides him a fortuitous opportunity to present himself as a consummate American who managed to realize the nation’s promise. In the preface to his novel, he offers his Roots as a “birthday gift” to the bicentennial nation. Thinking with Jacques Derrida, I characterize this gift as “an oblique offering” that beckons the reader to open the text to entertain Haley’s charismatic gesture and in turn, recognize his giftedness. The novel concludes with Haley’s well-known success story and bids the reader in an invitation to partake in its cause, Roots. In an outline of the novel, I show how Haley narrates the power of rootedness in two ways. The first is a nominal rootedness—the advantage of having identified origins. The second is the verbal nature of rootedness. Haley notes that in the United States, identifying one’s origins becomes a site where a group can take advantage or uproot another. This requires the uprooted to route for an identity that will work in this disadvantageous context. Complacency in that context appears as having managed to take root. Haley leads readers on two cycles of rootedness. The first half of the book follows Kunta Kinte’s uproot from Africa, his futile routing through America as a defeated runaway, and his taking root as a New World patriarch who passes on African traditions to his daughter, Kizzy. The second half of the novel goes through cycle with each verbal inflection personified by a descendant of Kunta Kinte. Kizzy’s uprooted from her nuclear family and raped by her new slave master. Their son, George routes through a biracial struggle wherein trusting his father leads to the rent of his own family. But George’s son, Tom helps the family take root in the old ways passed on by Kizzy and Kunta—and eventually in the Reconstruction South. The Close Reading evinces two arguments about the way identity works in the United States. The first is that it qualifies the argument of cultural studies scholars who choose to describe identity as “routing” over and against “roots.” Routing is a helpful reminder that identity is not static. But the grammar of rooting calls due attention to the power dynamics of these operational acts. Secondly, Haley’s own identity claims are a meta-reflection on historiography as “scripture.” In my analysis, I show that not only does Haley offer an American scripture in Roots, but that the narrative turns (i.e. uprooting, routing, taking root) happen around the way scriptures manifest in the novel’s Translatlantic scenes—be it family history, conjure roots, the Qur’an, the Bible, newspapers, and other indices of power.

This fourth chapter deploys discourse analysis of Kunta Kinte references in African American TV, Film, and Music. I begin by making clear Haley’s enduring legacy on helping audiences identify black dreams (and nightmares) in America. While a case could be made that Kunta Kinte references in American media are routine, I argue that a discussion of Roots must first recognize that it ushered in a meta-discourse that impressed itself as a core value of American—especially African American—life. To make this point, I look at lyrics from hip hop artists Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar and how they adopt the Kunta Kinte myth to narrate their own success stories. Using theories from Vincent L. Wimbush and James Watts, I characterize this order of scripturalizing as rootinization (cf. routinization). Then I use discourse analysis to survey Kunta Kinte allusions in the thirty years since the Roots moment. Each clip is categorized according to the grammar of uproot, route, and taking root as explained in chapter three. With the help of critical humor theory, this coding further underscores how we can elaborate on operational acts of identification—in this particular case, inter—and intra-racial performance as mediated through appeals to Kunta Kinte. Uproot characterizes situations where Kunta Kinte is evoked to displace and disorient an other. Haley’s patriarch becomes a slur in which the objectified person is likened to a slave—a person with limited agency in the face of the subject’s arrogated dominance. Examples here include comedian Richard Pryor handling a heckler (1983), the hazing of Eddie Murphy’s fish-out-of water protagonist in Coming to America (1988), Tyler Perry’s tough-love matriarch, Madea in Diary of a Mad Black Woman 2005, and a fictive disciplinary account in Chris Rock’s coming-of-age autobiography, Everybody Hates Chris (2008). In these clips we observe white and black persons alike using Kunta Kinte to astrange black persons from the possibility of complacency (i.e. rootedness) in a social setting. Route characterizes conflicts wherein “Kunta Kinte” names a frustration where in a party has yet to determine how to navigate a new world situation. Like the protagonist, one learns enough about stymying systemic circumstances to live long enough to express dissatisfaction. Allusions to these liminal sentiments are found in debates about authentic blackness at a black college in A Different World (1990), politics of respectability and uplift in Boyz N the Hood (1991), black cops interrogating an African suspect in the crime drama, The Wire (2003), and a buffoonish repartee in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1991 and 1992). Each of these situations involve black people failing to prove themselves as more empowered (i.e. rooted) than another. Taking Root heralds a black person’s acquisition of de jure American citizenship. Just as Kunta Kinte finds a way for his bloodline to carry onward in the new world, Americans who call upon his name have the pride of privilege to live in and critique the nation. Instances of this liberty are highlighted in a “Weekend Update” sketch commemorating Root’s 25th anniversary on Saturday Night Live (2002), a Roots parody on Chappelle’s Show (2003), and LeVar Burton’s absurd reprisal of his Kunta Kinte persona on the postmodern sitcom Community (2011). The instances are united in their use of humor and hyperbole to reveal the overstatement of American post-racial discourse. By further charting the dynamic, verbal aspects of rootedness, the chapter provides a theoretical language for further parsing operational acts of identification. We can more effectively discuss who is uprooting whom, among what concerns are people routing, and on what terms may people take root.

The final chapter of the book addresses scholarly resistance to theorizing scriptures in terms of “roots.” Like Wilfred Cantwell Smith, many in religious studies appeal to rhetorics of “transcendence” as a quality that distinguishes scriptures from other influential cultural texts. This proves unsatisfying when transcendence is deconstructed or deracinated as the deep-seeded dynamic of people transcending perceived problems. In this chapter, I revisit how minoritized scholars in the late 20th century appealed to Roots in order to legitimate themselves and their erudite engagement with proper scriptures in the eyes of academic guilds like the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. This ironic act of identification should remind scholars why—critically speaking— scriptures is a reference to rootwork rather than simplistic arrogations of rootedness. I begin by presenting W.C. Smith’s influential argument about scriptures as promising yet critically inconsistent. His What is Scripture?: A Comparative Approach (Fortress Press, 1993) begins with an argument for theorizing a relationality of scriptures as the engagement of people with their texts. It introduced a provocative framework that refocused the study of scriptures into an investigation of human activity. But by the end of his book, he amended his bi-focal analysis to qualify his arbitrary attention to the world religion, noting that what distinguishes them is the transcendence infused in the engagement. This move advanced his pluralist agenda within a Calvinist hermeneutics that ultimately restrained his study of scriptures. I then point out how such canonical contests are intimately related to the social politics of the academic study of religion. I appeal to Tomoko Masuzawa’s discussion of the world religions paradigm as a Western exercise in maintaining dominance and demonstrate how W.C. Smith’s reading of scripture complements her argument. I also look at the racial, gender, and religious stratification of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Thinking with Vincent Wimbush, Merinda Simmons, and Charles Long, I demonstrate how the canons of these guilds illustrate not only what can be studied within them but who can belong within them. The chapter observes the rise of liberation theology and interfaith dialogue as Pyrrhic victories for those on the margins of the guild—particularly African Americans. Through the intellectual pursuits of marginalized communities have found some affirmation, it was not through an embrace of sola scriptura as traditionally conceived. I perform a critical exegesis of works like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her, Cain Hope Felder’s Stony the Road We Trod, and the journal for the Center for the Church and the Black Experience at Garret Evangelical Theological Seminar, among others examples of Roots-inspired religious studies scholarship. Haley’s saga taught a generation of theologians and historians how to recontextualize the racist, patriarchal, and abtract nature of their “sacred” text and claim them as their roots. These enterprising scribes harnessed the success of Roots to legitimate their own vernacular academic musings. The liberationist exemplars explicitly read Roots alongside their Bibles to not only write their stories but to affix themselves as productive academics in good standing. Were we to predicate “scriptures” on an understanding of what Russell McCutcheon terms “religion sui generis,” we would overlook the ways marginalized communities read, write, and redact themselves within the tradition of their dominators to express agency. In separating scriptures from the notion of sacredness, critical scholars can better identify the moves people make with their texts. Refusal to examine “non-religious” examples only effaces the very rootwork (e.g. techniques, politics, contexts) that makes a text into scripture.

Identifying Roots ends by recasting the employ of “roots” in discussions of identity politics. Even if rhizomes are the best way illustrate knowledge production, critical scholars must grant that there are some trees of signification that appear to orient the signifier rather than the other way around. The signs and significance that appear to impress upon their own meaning is what Bourdieu is pointing to with his tracing of the doxological features of a habitus. This is the discourse that we can embolden with scriptures—people’s unexamined grasping for roots in a rhizomatic world. In a sphere of signification, there still persist expressions that impress revolutionary effects on individuals and societies. Following DeCerteau, it is in this vain that we identify scriptures. They are not about set apart signs but the signs we say set us apart, not just the texts we read but the texts that read us back. In Haley’s words, scriptures are the “source-places” that enable us to make difference and make a difference in the world. The anthropology of scriptures attends to these concerns, offering a language to signify humans’ operational acts of identification.

This volume presents a cultural history of Alex Haley’s Roots as a case study in ‘operational acts of identification.’ It examines the strategy and tactics Haley employed in developing a family origin story into an acclaimed national history. Where cultural studies scholars have critiqued notions of sacrosanct ‘rootedness,’ this book shows the fruit of critically identifying those claims. It reframes the concept of ‘roots’ as a theoretical vocabulary and grammar for the anthropology of scriptures – a way of parsing the cultural texts that seem to read us back. Identifying Roots invites scholars of religion to reimagine their place in the humans sciences. Theorizing from a tradition of African American interventions in the history of religion, Richard Newton registers the social dramas and dynamic rhetoric that render the cultural logic of scriptures powerful. Creatively marshaling intellectual history, ethnographic autobiography, Close Reading and discourse analysis, Newton enumerates the consequences for signifying people and cultural texts as intrinsically significant. More than an investigation into Alex Haley’s legacy, Identifying Roots unearths the politics of beginnings and belongings.

This volume presents a cultural history of Alex Haley’s Roots as a case study in ‘operational acts of identification.’ It examines the strategy and tactics Haley employed in developing a family origin story into an acclaimed national history. Where cultural studies scholars have critiqued notions of sacrosanct ‘rootedness,’ this book shows the fruit of critically identifying those claims. It reframes the concept of ‘roots’ as a theoretical vocabulary and grammar for the anthropology of scriptures – a way of parsing the cultural texts that seem to read us back. Identifying Roots invites scholars of religion to reimagine their place in the humans sciences. Theorizing from a tradition of African American interventions in the history of religion, Richard Newton registers the social dramas and dynamic rhetoric that render the cultural logic of scriptures powerful. Creatively marshaling intellectual history, ethnographic autobiography, Close Reading and discourse analysis, Newton enumerates the consequences for signifying people and cultural texts as intrinsically significant. More than an investigation into Alex Haley’s legacy, Identifying Roots unearths the politics of beginnings and belongings.