Overview

The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

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9781788168144

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An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery ... driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. -- Elizabeth Schmidt * The New York Times * One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers ... She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns -- Claudia Rankine This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember ... A magnificent achievement. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr By addressing gaps and omissions in accounts of trans-Atlantic slavery ... Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed. -- MacArthur statement [Hartman writes] with striking intimacy, evoking the feelings and the conditions of Black life -- Alexis Okeowo * New Yorker * Praise for Saidiya Hartman: She was so smart that I thought the windows were gonna blow out, the quickness of her mind and the sharpness of her critique were breathtaking. -- Judith Butler * on meeting Hartman * She's not an 'angry Black woman. She's not Assata Shakur. But what they don't know is that, where Assata Shakur will blow your head off, Saidiya has just put a stiletto between your ribs. -- Frank B. Wilderson III, Chair of the Department of African-American stucies, UC Irivine

"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery ... driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. -- Elizabeth Schmidt * The New York Times * One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers ... She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns -- Claudia Rankine This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember ... A magnificent achievement. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr By addressing gaps and omissions in accounts of trans-Atlantic slavery ... Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed. -- MacArthur statement [Hartman writes] with striking intimacy, evoking the feelings and the conditions of Black life -- Alexis Okeowo * New Yorker * Praise for Saidiya Hartman: ""She was so smart that I thought the windows were gonna blow out, the quickness of her mind and the sharpness of her critique were breathtaking."" -- Judith Butler * on meeting Hartman * She's not an 'angry Black woman. She's not Assata Shakur. But what they don't know is that, where Assata Shakur will blow your head off, Saidiya has just put a stiletto between your ribs. -- Frank B. Wilderson III, Chair of the Department of African-American stucies, UC Irivine"

Author Information

Saidiya Hartman is a Columbia University professor of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant.

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