You're searching the information website.
Search Help Advanced Search

Lose your mother :
a journey along the Atlantic slave route /
Saidiya Hartman.

Description

Tools

Cite this Export citation file
Main Author
Hartman, Saidiya V.
Language(s)
English
Published
©2007.
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Edition
1st ed.
Subjects
Hartman, Saidiya V.
Hartman, Saidiya V.
Hartman, Saidiya V. > Travel > Ghana.
Historic sites > Ghana.
Slave trade > Ghana > History.
Sklavenhandel
Travel
Slave trade
Historic sites
Traite des esclaves > Ghāna > Histoire.
Historic sites > Ghana
Slave trade > Ghana > History.
Ghana > Description and travel.
Ghana
Ghana
Ghana > History, Local.
Ghana > Description and travel
Local history
History
Summary
"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, Hartman 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, one 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, an alien. 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 draws her deeper into the heartland of slavery. She passes through the holding cells of military forts and castles, the ruins of towns and villages devastated by the trade, and the fortified settlements built to repel predatory armies and kidnappers. In artful passages of historical portraiture, she shows us an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa, a girl murdered aboard a slave ship, and a community of fugitives seeking a haven from slave raiders"--Jacket.
Physical Description
xi, 270 pages : black and white illustrations ; 24 cm
ISBN


0374270821
9780374270827
Locate a Print Version
Find in a library

Viewability

Item Link Original Source
Limited (search only)   Harvard University
Limited (search only)   University of California
©2025 HathiTrust
Privacy Policy|Takedown Policy|Cookie Settings