Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Hartman, Saidiya

Community & Culture

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

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).

Parenting & Relationships

A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century.
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.
In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them―domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty―and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires. 67 black and white illustrations

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

History

Americas

W.W.Norton&Company

Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism "Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history." ―Parul Sehgal, New York Times
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires. 67 black and white illustrations

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists - agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies - convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book. Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that 'for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.' Informed by her practice of 'curation as care,' Brazilian film curator Janaina Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: 'it's almost by falling that you live... The beautiful world dances then stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing.' Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, 'If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?' and gestures toward the possibility of this 'as yet unlived, unexperienced thing.' Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that 'Pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.' And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which 'lays the groundwork for the irruption The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.' Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world.

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

Politics & Social Sciences

Rivera-Garza, Cristina

Pierce, Joseph M.

Boswell, Phoebe

Oliveira, Janaína

Social Sciences

Alchemy by Knopf Canada

Review\n"Meticulously researched.... The 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery’s ever-running machinations." 
― Omari Weekes, Vulture\n"Innovative.... [Hartman’s] writing is impassioned and even lyrical at times.... This is a powerful and thought-provoking examination of slavery’s far-reaching legacy." 
― Publishers Weekly\n"Audacious. Original and provocative. What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible. A major scholarly contribution." 
― Nation\n"The brilliance of the book―a brilliance that is considerable, formidable and rare―is present in the space Hartman leaves for the ongoing (re)production of [black] performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene [of violence]." 
― Fred Moten, author of The Consent Not to Be a Single Being\n"Sharpens our understanding of whiteness, property, and happiness in startling ways." 
― David Roediger, author of Wages of Whiteness\n"In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman prepared an intellectual ground for the phrase [the afterlife of slavery] to take root. Insisting that the conventional wisdom that slavery had died with legal emancipation was wrong, and that slavery was, as she put, ‘transformed rather than annulled by the 13th amendment of the US constitution,’ Hartman challenged us to consider that slavery didn’t just have a lingering trace or a shadowy aftereffect in the post-emancipation moment." 
― Stephanie Smallwood, author of Saltwater Slavery\nThe groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated. 
Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection―Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded―her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. 
This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.\nFrom the Back Cover\nPraise for Saidiya Hartman and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments\nWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 
Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction\n“Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed.” 
―The MacArthur Foundation\n“I’m enthralled by [Hartman’s] gift for combining historical research with evocative imaginative leaps. Her writing in [Wayward Lives] is a profound act of reclamation, and a simply stunning read.” 
―Maaza Mengiste\n“Hartman, one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers, introduced the term ‘critical fabulation’ into my world. She’s a theorist and writer who actually changes what’s possible in my thought patterns. It’s exciting.” 
―Claudia Rankine\n“I was inspired, surprised, and deeply moved. . . . [Hartman’s] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details.” 
―Leslie Jamison\n“[Wayward Lives] left me awestruck and grateful. I don’t think I

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

HighBridge Audio

What was the fate of the first generations of black women born after abolition in America? Struggle: to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape new forms of servitude, and to live as if they really were free. This book recreates the radical imagination and wayward practices of these young women by describing the world through their eyes. 
Recreating their fragmentary life stories using a combination of archival research and virtuosic literary imagination, a very different vision of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalism. Here is an aesthetical and riotous history - a revolution in tastes and mores that set the stage for the Jazz Age and the social upheavels. The decades between 1890 and 1935 were decisive in determining the shape of 20th century modernity, and young black women were the unacknowledged agents of that transformation.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Serpent's Tail

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020\nAt the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.\nThese women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood - all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.\nIn Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hartman, Saidiya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hartman, Saidiya

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hartman, Saidiya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals