Knowra Roots: The Saga of an American Family Roots: The Saga of an American Family Alex Haley’s 1976 novel follows several generations of an African American family, beginning with Kunta Kinte, captured in West Africa and enslaved in America. It combines family history with historical fiction.
Alex Haley : An American writer whose works include the novel Roots and the autobiography The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley wrote the novel and presented it as a reconstruction of his family history.
Kunta Kinte : A fictionalized Mandinka man at the center of Roots, captured in West Africa and enslaved in colonial America. His capture and forced passage begin the family history narrated by the novel.
Roots (1977 miniseries) : An American television adaptation of Roots, broadcast over eight consecutive nights in January 1977. Its unusually large audience amplified the novel’s account of slavery and family ancestry.
Genealogical research : The systematic investigation of family relationships using records, oral histories, and other evidence. Its standards of corroboration differ from the novel’s narrative reconstruction of Haley’s ancestry.
Cultural identity : A sense of belonging shaped by shared cultural practices, histories, languages, and affiliations. The novel links Kunta Kinte’s remembered heritage to descendants raised under slavery.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X : A 1965 account of Malcolm X’s life, written with Alex Haley. Haley developed his interview-based narrative practice while collaborating on this earlier book.
Kizzy Kinte : A character in Roots, the daughter of Kunta Kinte and the mother of Chicken George. Her separation from her father and later descendants carry the family line forward.
Roots tourism : Travel to sites associated with family ancestry, often shaped by public histories of migration and enslavement. The novel helped make visits to Gambian places associated with Kunta Kinte a visible form of ancestral travel.
Historical novel : A novel whose plot and characters engage with a historical period or setting. Roots combines invented scenes and dialogue with claims about real people and events.
Collective memory : Shared representations of the past maintained by a group through stories, institutions, and cultural practices. Roots helped shape popular memory of slavery and African American ancestry.
Show all 28