Lose Your Mother

"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery ... driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. -- Elizabeth Schmidt * The New York Times * One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers ... She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns -- Claudia Rankine This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember ... A magnificent achievement. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr By addressing gaps and omissions in accounts of trans-Atlantic slavery ... Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed. -- MacArthur statement [Hartman writes] with striking intimacy, evoking the feelings and the conditions of Black life -- Alexis Okeowo * New Yorker * Praise for Saidiya Hartman: ""She was so smart that I thought the windows were gonna blow out, the quickness of her mind and the sharpness of her critique were breathtaking."" -- Judith Butler * on meeting Hartman * She's not an 'angry Black woman. She's not Assata Shakur. But what they don't know is that, where Assata Shakur will blow your head off, Saidiya has just put a stiletto between your ribs. -- Frank B. Wilderson III, Chair of the Department of African-American stucies, UC Irivine"