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Event Date
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Hart Hall 3201
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Hart Hall
๐ Presented by UC Davis African American and African Studies
On Accommodation: Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother
Saidiya Hartman begins her landmark account of Ghana's heritage tourism route with a stirring description of her alienation, predicated on the Twi epithet obruni / oborษnyi. By establishing from the outset Hartman's extraneity from both Ghana as host country and Africa as motherland, the critic sets up the essential stakes for the narrative portion of Lose Your Mother. (2008) At several key points in the text, Hartman makes affective demands of the Ghanaian and African locals she comes across that either go unanswered or are forcefully rejected. Thus there is an essential tension between the reconciliatory desires of diaspora tourists engaging in Ghana's booming heritage tourism industry and the local right to accommodate persons considered to be cultural outsiders, foreigners and visitors. This short essay studies the literary dynamics of Lose Your Mother, with special attention to Hartman's descriptions of alienation and rejection from the Ghanaian locals. I use these descriptions to theorize the problem of accommodation as an essential part of the tourism industry in general and as an under-theorized aspect of the intramural account of heritage tourisms and returnees in West Africa in particular. The essay studies how accommodation participates in the affective economy of tourism as a perceived right towards hospitality.