Review of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route: Tracing the Unfinished Journey to Finding Identity

Creator

Watson, Hanna
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies

Abstract

Beginning with the Portuguese greed for gold in the fifteenth century, African chattel slavery thrived for generations, acting as fuel for Western capitalism. For many black Americans, bloated bodies of existential questions surface when they cannot identify their specific ethnic origins. As a result, droves have retraced the Middle Passage seeking closure for the still-gaping wound of transatlantic chattel slavery. In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008), Saidiya Hartman details her year of research as a Fulbright Scholar in Accra, Ghana, where she learned that these African American longings cannot be satisfied by a return to a place that is only debatably their own. This memoir of sorts takes a fresh angle on the relationship between the diaspora and the Mother Continent, and addresses African conceptions of African Americans, shame, and commodification. Using these themes, Hartman weaves a story of loss and discovery that invites readers to search for hope in unconventional places and reconsider their own understandings of their individual and collective pasts.

Date of publication

DOI

Resource type

Rights statement

Journal title

Journal volume

Journal issue

Page start

Page end

Language

Relations

Parents:

In Collection:

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Visibility	Actions
	08_GAR_4_1_Watson.pdf	2020-03-11	Public	Download