Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Product Information

Saidiya Hartman’s story of retracing the routes of the Atlantic slave trade in Ghana is an original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present and a welcome illustration of the powers of innovative scholarship to help us better understand how history shapes identity. The monumentality of the castle gave heft to the assertion and grandeur to the fledgling post-colonial state.

When Stella opened the door to the room that would be mine, I hoped my disappointment wasn't too obvious. And I set out on the slave route, which was both an existent territory with objective coordinates and the figurative realm of an imagined past, determined to do exactly this.The structural adjustment programs and debtor country initiatives orchestrated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were the new slavery. All that comes from man's imagination is realizable," or sobered by them: "We are backed up against the wall in our destitution like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the quiet peace of the manufacturers and merchants of misery.

So I hurried up Osu Road as blind to the future Sankara had envisioned as every other beleaguered pedestrian. In Tennessee, she might have had children of her own because nursemaids were often wet nurses who suckled their master's children.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. There was no question John hoped to answer in the dungeon, because like many exiles he no longer hoped for anything.

While Europe and North America built modern nations from the blood of slaves, the African interior experienced widespread depopulation, and the riches gained by merchants and royals - often in the form of cowrie shells, now worthless - did not perdure. For more than an hour I listened to the sounds of vehicles rumbling along the road and the boots of soldiers striking the pavement and the volley of commands and the crack and pop of exploding shells.The very term "slavery" derived from the word "Slav," because Eastern Europeans were the slaves of the medieval world. Richard Wright had visited the Gold Coast in 1953 and written a powerful account of the struggle for independence.