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 RankineThis is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember … A magnificent achievement. – Henry Louis Gates JrBy 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

Saidiya Hartman is a Columbia University professor of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant.