As a way of understanding identity, the concept of rootedness has increasingly been subjected to acerbic political and theoretical critiques. Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to police identity through a politics of purity-excluding anyone who doesn't share the same narrative. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led toga suspicion against essence and origins regardless of their political implications. The central argument of Queer Roots for the Diaspora is that, in spite of these debates around the concept of roots, ultimately the desire for roots contains the "roots" of its own deconstruction. The book considers alternative root narratives that acknowledge the impossibility of returning to origins with any certainty
welcome sexual diversity
acknowledge their own fictionality
reveal that even a single collective identity can be rooted in multiple ways
and create family trees haunted by the queer others patrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. The roots narratives simultaneously assert and question rooted identities within a number of diasporas-African, Jewish, and Armenian.