Lose Your Mother A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route
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Lose Your Mother
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.
Scenes of Subjection
Author: Saidiya V. Hartman
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Release Date: 1997
In the tradition of Eric Lott's award-winning Love and Theft, Hartman's new book shows how the violence of captivity and enslavement was embodied in many of the performance practices that grew from, and about, slave culture in antebellum America. Using tools from anthropology and history aswell as literary criticism, she examines a wealth of material, including songs, dance, stories, diaries, narratives, and journals to provide new insights into a range of issues. She looks particularly at the presentations of slavery and blackness in minstrelsy, melodrama, and the sentimental novel;the disparity between actual slave culture and "managed" plantation amusements; the construction of slave culture in nineteenth-century ethnographic writing; the rhetorical performance of slave law and slave narratives; the dimension of slave performance practice; and the political consciousness offolklore. Particularly provocative is her analysis of the slave pen and auction block, which transmogrified terror into theatre, and her reading of the rhetoric of seduction in slavery law and legal cases concerning rape. Persuasively showing that the exercise of power is inseparable from itsdisplay, Scenes of Subjection will interest readers involved in a wide range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.
African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade
The story of the Atlantic slave trade has largely been filtered through the records of white Europeans, but in this watershed book, Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana once famously called "the Old Slave Coast" share stories that reveal that Africans were both traders and victims of the trade. Though Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, their involvement had devastating consequences on their history and sense of identity. Like trauma victims, many African societies experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing astonishing oral histories that were handed down through generations of storytellers, Bailey breaks this deafening silence and explores the delicate nature of historical memory in this rare, unprecedented book. "Bailey offers a noteworthy, carefully researched contribution to the study of the African slave trade . . . [and] brings unheard historical voices to the fore." -Publishers Weekly "A remarkable effort to present the slave trade from a perspective very different from what we are used to-not that of slavery"s liberal opponents or even of the slaves themselves but of the Africans from whose midst the slaves were taken . . . Bailey is scrupulously objective in making her way through the resulting political minefield . . . People like Anne Bailey make us uncomfortable, which is all to the good." -Daniel Lazare, The Nation "A true work of retrieval and restoration . . . A remarkable gift." -Ato Quayson, director, African Studies Centre, University of Cambridge, UK