Week 5 Media Item #1: Roots

Roots is a 1977 television mini-series about slavery, particularly beginning with a boy, Kunta Kinte, taken from his home in Africa and then raised as a slave in the United States. The story follows each generation of his family over a number of years, and includes many events such as the Civil War or Emancipation.

The story of Roots follows along the lines of Octavia Butler's Kindred. The novel Butler writes is about a character, Dana, who follows a plantation of slaves over a number of years. Roots also is similar in that it follows a genealogical line of slaves over a number of years. Both the novel and the miniseries show the life of a slave in the South during the 1800s. The novel captures well the absolute inhumanity and injustice that was a part of slavery, and Roots does the same in depicting graphic violence against the slaves. Both are fiction, but based around non-fictitious facts about slavery by showing how slaves actually lived and depicting the racism and brutality of the system.

I never saw the enitrety of Roots, but I've managed to watch parts and it is quite a compelling work of fiction. It uses the reality of slavery and applies it to a story just as Butler did with her novel. I thought that both Roots and Kindred were similar in their approaches to depicting the slave era, and both were very interesting and effective in showing how life would have been in that era of history.

Image citation:
Roots. IMDB. Online. Available: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075572/ (July 20, 2007).