Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Author: Saidiya Hartman
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Print Length: 288 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Essay, Travel Writing, History
Topic: Black People, Belonging, Family, History, Othering & Otherness, Slavery, The Notion of Home
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.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue: The Path of Strangers
One: Afrotopia
Two: Market and Martyrs
Three: The Family Romance
Four: Come, Go Back, Child
Five: The Tribe of the Middle Passage
Six: So Many Dungeons
Seven: The Dead Book
Eight: Lose Your Mother
Nine: The Dark Days
Ten: The Famished Road
Eleven: Blood Cowries
Twelve: Fugitive Dreams
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Saidiya Hartman was born and raised in New York City. She is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). She has published articles on slavery, the archive, and the city, including “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Belly of the World.” She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University.
Source: https://saidiyahartman.com/about/
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