Lose your mother : a journey along the Atlantic slave route
(Book)

Book Cover
Average Rating
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Format
Book
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
xi, 270 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Status
Main Library - Adult
306.362 Har
1 available

Description

Loading Description...

Also in this Series

Checking series information...

Copies

LocationCall NumberStatus
Main Library - Adult306.362 HarOn Shelf

Extras

More Details

Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Edition
1st ed.
Language
English
UPC
9780374270827

Notes

Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-258) and index.
Description
"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.

Reviews from GoodReads

Loading GoodReads Reviews.