When in 1978 African American journalist Alex Haley published his historical quest Roots, it was an almost instant success. The book sold by the millions and its immensely popular adaption for television conquered the world. In the Netherlands, for instance, the series was broadcasted several times and is still available on DVD. Haley had done what so many in the African Diaspora wanted: find the route back to where their ancestors came from before their enslavement in West- and Central Africa. He used stories and archives and all kinds of other tangible and intangible cultural heritage to find his way back to the Mandinka family of royal blood in Gambia that he eventually dug up to be his forefathers. For a long time, the concept of “roots” was almost synonymous with African roots.

Eventually, however, two parallel discourses on roots emerged: on the one hand, an academic discourse with political implications, closely linked to issues of globalization, diaspora and identity, and, on the other hand, a more popular discourse focused on authenticity and belonging.

In the field of cultural studies, in particular, the concept of roots fell on fertile academic ground. From the 1990s onwards, scholars – including Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and James Clifford, to mention some of the most prominent names in this field – have worked on the interplay of roots and diaspora. They made it part of their discourse on cultural identity and paired “roots” with “routes”. In their view, cultural identities, especially diasporic cultural identities, are a continuous dialogue between roots, which is a state of being tied to a specific place, and routes, which is a state of displacement. Put differently, cultural identities are not only firmly rooted in histories, language and culture of a particular place (who we are; where we come from), but also, and perhaps even more so, part of a process of becoming. In some of these postmodern from-roots-to-routes approaches, uprootedness seems almost celebrated. Clearly, this attitude reflects an era in which ongoing processes of globalization intensified, leading to lively debates about the position and importance of the hybrid, the Creole, and métissage, as might be observed, for instance, of the works of Homi Bhabha, Ulf Hannerz and Nikos Papastergiadis.