Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2020 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Named one of the Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times Book Review
"Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history." —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this eye-opening non-fiction book, Saidiya Hartman explores an important and too-often overlooked aspect of U.S. history—the impact of Black women on urban life. Rather than focusing on major events, Hartman surveys the lives, relationships, and overall culture of Black women living in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century. Her fascinating subjects met life on their own terms, abandoning existing social structures to create their own values and mores when it came to labour, marriage, sexuality, and more. While a few famous names—like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells—occasionally show up, the focus is real women Hartman finally gives historical voice to here, and the sense of both freedom and potential danger in their lives. This book will change the way you think about America’s shift to urbanization and what a truly radical break from tradition could look like.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lyrical and novelistic speculative history, Hartman (Lose Your Mother), a Columbia University professor of English and comparative literature, reconstructs the lives of unknown black female urban rebels from the early 20th century, everyday women whose existences are hinted at by court records, social workers' notes, and photographs and who she heralds as "radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live." The photos (taken between 1890 and 1935) inspired the book, and each chapter is anchored by one, around which is woven a vignette about the inner experience of the woman depicted, sometimes zooming out to encompass whole parties or streets or neighborhoods, sometimes intersecting with historical figures of note such as sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, suffragist and NAACP cofounder Mary White Ovington, or actress Edna Thomas. Hartman wonders about and imagines her subjects' lives between the archival lines in vivid detail. Taken together, the affectionate and reverent reconstructions add up to a picture of black urban women's courage, their attempts to carve out freedom, love, autonomy, power, and pleasure in socially constrained circumstances: "A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom." This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement.
