Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 100 BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020
'Exhilarating ... A rich resurrection of forgotten history' The New York Times
At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.
These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood - all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.
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.
