There are things that I can take for granted. I may not be able to recite my family tree by rote, and there is the question that my paternal grandmother may have been Jewish, but I know that my family hails from England, France, Canada, Lithuania, and Italy. It is something that I have taken for... ...more
This passage stuck me as no other in the book has. In Chapter 4, "Come, Go Back, Child", p100: "Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the... ...more
In both Bayo Hasley’s book, ‘Routes of Remembrance’ and Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Lose Your Mother’, the authors--female African-American scholars--explore shared ground: the political economy of diasporic celebrations, the complex politics of memory for inhabitants in the shadow of Cape Coast and Elmin... ...more
I was somewhat surprised at this book. Having read Hartman's first published book, Scenes of Subjection, I was expecting a similar analytic angle. I didn't get what I expected, but I got something rather amazing, nevertheless. The analytic value of this book goes on at both at the descriptive lev... ...more
"If secretly I had been hoping that there was some cure to feeling extraneous in the world, then at that moment I knew there wasn't a remedy for my homelessness."
This book, a sort of travel memoir on Hartman's travels in Ghana tracing various experiences of the Atlantic slave trade, was thoughtfu... ...more
Currently in process, but so far amazing. Puts a lot in perspective.Very sad yet interesting journey seen through the very detailed authors eyes. ...more
It's the all-encompassing, overwhelming depth and breadth of feeling in Saidiya V. Hartman's tour de force Lose Your Mother that makes it so difficult yet so intoxicating, that nurtures your spirit while pummeling your chest. It's the juxtaposition of simmering prose and abject gut-punches that m... ...more
A really great book--Hartman traces her research journey through various slave trade sites in Ghana alongside her emotional reaction to them and the constant deferral of what she emotionally wants/needs out of that trip. There's so much going on in here about space and geography, and the collapsi... ...more