Lose Your Mother
A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · January 22, 2008
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.
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- Who it’s for
- Saidiya Hartman joins historical reckoning with a searching journey through the afterlives of slavery.
- Genres
- Slavery Studies, Black History, Black & African American Lives
- Published
- Farrar Straus & Giroux, January 22, 2008
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In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history. The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger—torn from family, home, and country.
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To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping 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 whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).
History and Kinship
Saidiya Hartman joins historical reckoning with a searching journey through the afterlives of slavery.
Come here for
- A personal journey that opens onto the history of the Atlantic slave trade
- Reflections on kinship, historical rupture, and the search for belonging
Expect
- Vivid attention to three centuries of African and African American history
- Intimate encounters with people along the route and figures from the past
Where it sits
| Slavery Studies | 33% |
|---|---|
| Black & African American Lives | 24% |
| Black History | 24% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Cultural Heritage Lives
- Personal Memoirs
- West African History
- Authors
- Saidiya Hartman
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- January 22, 2008
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Cultural Heritage Lives