Summary Of Lose Your Mother By Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman book " Lose Your Mother" is about the Atlantic slave trade and the journeys of the captives. Through this book she follows the line of her family history and genealogy. She shows the passage of three centuries of African and American history with slavery and its causes and effects. This book does more than look at the whole history of the slave trade; it is, also, a journey for Saidiya Hartman, herself. She sees States a social death not only in Africa but in the Americas through the strangers she meets and the history she learns. Social death is the condition of people not accepted as fully human by a wider society. This term is most often used by sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman and historians of slavery and the Holocaust

You can see this and African Americans fighting the idea of kinship versus nationality. Our society has shifted so far away from the traditional idea of kinship and bloodlines that they are no longer important when it comes to who you are for most people. Nationality has taken this position that kinship once had. It is less about who you come from and more where you end up and what you make of yourself. However, people still look for that kinship tie to their culture. Because of the lack of History and prevalent amount of government denial, kinship ties and family culture can sometimes not be found for many African Americans today. Apartment learned on her journey that many people in West Africa see themselves as the losers of slavery because slave descendants today in America have more opportunities Than People in West Africa. Hartman through the stringy was trying to find her kinship ties and her culture and who she was. Instead she found that kinship cannot stand up today. Hartman States " it was a dream of autonomy rather than National Hood. It was a dream of an elsewhere, with all the promises and dangerous, where the scaleless might, at last, thrive." (234) you can see by the end of the book The Hartmann's of what she was going to find on her journey was not the end