“Slicing the Hunger”: Queering Diaspora in Melvin Dixon’s Change of Territory

Us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways.

—Zora Neale Hurston

Were Alex Haley to write Roots today, that twelve year labor of love, the research might take him between two weeks and a month. Advances in internet technologies and DNA testing have transformed genealogical research from the preoccupation of the obsessed, the retired, and the specially funded, into a national pastime. Over the past several years, we have watched professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. help stars such as Oprah Winfrey and Chris Rock discover their genealogical origins; the popular website The Root, founded by Gates, contains a range of tools to aid amateur genealogists; and over 1,300 websites promise to help searchers “Discover Your Family Story,” the tag on Genealogy.com. For African Americans, this invitation to explore the past is mediated by Haley’s Roots, which serves as the genealogical ur-text, promising that such research will be rewarded by discovering rich, fully-fleshed historical characters with the pathos and eccentricities of Kunta Kinte and Chicken George.

Reviewed by James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, Roots had a profound and lasting impact, especially after it debuted as a TV miniseries on ABC in January 1977. Parents named their children after the lead characters, African Americans booked tours to the village of Juffure in Gambia, historians debated the narrative’s accuracy, and genealogy became a national hobby.¹ A Gallup poll conducted of 1,507 individuals in 1977 indicated that 71% of whites and 80% of blacks had read about or seen portions of the televised series. Critics and cultural commentators described Roots not as a black American story, but as an American story. Indeed, reputable historians disregarded its historical and factual inaccuracies, with Professor David B. Davis of Yale claiming, “we all need certain myths about the past” (qtd. in Shenker 29). As David Chioni Moore has observed, Roots became a sacred American text, mythic in proportion, culturally and historically authoritative, and virtually unquestioned.

Whereas earlier generations of black cultural workers expressed their ambivalence toward Africa—”What is Africa to me?” asks Countee Cullen—post-civil rights activists, especially those affiliated with the Black Arts movement, proudly claimed Africa as a homeland. As John O’Neal puts it, “We are an African People” (47). Although never officially affiliated with the Black Arts movement, Haley provided empirical evidence for claims made by black aestheticians, who sought cultural and historical legitimacy for African American works by situating them within a narrative of authenticity grounded in a historico-mythical relationship to Africa. Going beyond aesthetic transcendence, Haley’s genealogical project gave quiddity to their claims.

However, this valuable genealogical project placed heterosexuality and the black family at the heart of the diasporic experience, strategically excluding black queers. Powerful statements in Addison Gayle’s 1971 anthology, The Black Aesthetic, articulated normative heterosexuality as an aesthetic and political ideal. For example, Julian Mayfield writes, “[T]he Black Aesthetic has to do with . . . learning to live, and survive, in a nation of killers, so that our children may breathe a purer and freer air” (31). The emphasis on “children” in this passage establishes futurity as the goal of black politics: the black aesthetic project finds its raison d’être in the safe perpetuation of the race. Elizabeth Povinelli highlights the problematic nature of this stance when she asks, “Why does the recognition of peoples’ worth, of their human and civil rights, always seem to be hanging on the more or less fragile branches of a family tree? Why must we be held by these limits?” (215). Povinelli’s identification of genealogical inquiry as a “limit” resonates powerfully with United States racial histories, in which African Americans were traditionally excluded from white, mostly southern, family trees. Moreover, she points to the heteronormative limitations of genealogical inquiry.² How might one account for the black queer within genealogical projects? Or does genealogy remain a project inaccessible to the black queer?

Taking up these questions, this article examines Melvin Dixon’s book of poetry, Change of Territory, as an extended response...