Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother [5-week Reading Group, $150 suggested]

Instructor: Dahiya | Mondays May 30-June 27 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET

First published in 2007 and a personal memoir as much as it is a landmark critical text, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Transatlantic Slave Route has profoundly impacted how scholars understand and approach the past, (and present) of slavery and colonization. Hartman deploys a novel writing and methodological strategy she invents called critical fabulation, a narrative practice that strives to “embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know.” She teaches us about the importance of stories, how we might narrate to cope with loss through the act of telling an impossible story that must be told.

Book Synopsis from Macmillan:

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. 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).
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