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This title in other formats:Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Routeby Saidiya Hartman
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)"[Hartman's] beautiful and insightful narrative reminds readers of previous calls for freedom in the work of Anna J. Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Dubois and Richard Wright, among others. Saidiya Hartman stands in good company, and propels their work masterfully into the 21st century." Anne C. Bailey, Ms. Magazine (read the entire Ms. Magazine review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.
There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger — torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places — a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders — and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship. Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade. Review:"In this rousing narrative, Berkeley professor Hartman traces first-hand the progress of her ancestors-forced migrants from the Gold Coast-in order to illuminate the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Chronicling her time in Ghana following the overland slave route from the hinterland to the Atlantic, Hartman admits early on to a naïve search for her identity: 'Secretly I wanted to belong somewhere or, at least, I wanted a convenient explanation of why I felt like a stranger.' Fortunately, Hartman eschews the simplification of such a quest, finding that Africa's American expatriates often find themselves more lost than when they started. Instead, Hartman channels her longing into facing tough questions, nagging self-doubt and the horrors of the Middle Passage in a fascinating, beautifully told history of those millions whose own histories were revoked in 'the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born.' Shifting between past and present, Hartman also considers the 'afterlife of slavery,' revealing Africa-and, through her transitive experience, America-as yet unhealed by de-colonization and abolition, but showing signs of hope. Hartman's mix of history and memoir has the feel of a good novel, told with charm and passion, and should reach out to anyone contemplating the meaning of identity, belonging and homeland." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:"Hartman's surrender and suffering in the face of the memory of slavery and the slave trade — the horror of which can never be tallied — is noble and dignified." San Francisco Chronicle Review:"Hartman is hardly the first black American to go 'back' to Africa seeking a measure of personal and historical salvation. But she charts her heartbreak at not finding it with a meticulous honesty and mix of emotions...that feel distinctly 21st century." Los Angeles Times Review:"A provocative work, tinged with sadness and anger." Kirkus Reviews Review:"Hartman's strength is how she interweaves vivid scenes of the terror of the slave trade with her own internal struggle to confront the pain of slavery in her family's past." Library Journal Review:"This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement." Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University Synopsis:Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, retracing the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 20th century, and reckoning with the blank slate of her own genealogy. About the AuthorSaidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in the Nineteenth-Century America. She has taught at the University of California in Berkeley, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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