Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (intimate Histories Of Social Upheaval)

By (author) Hartman Saidiya
Short description/annotation
A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century.
Description

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.

In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were 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.

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

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"Exhilarating....A rich resurrection of a forgotten history....[Hartman’s] rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension....This kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time."
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"I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved....[Hartman’s] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details."
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"Revelatory....The book''s broad sweep, and its nimble pivoting among a range of scales and perspectives, make room for anonymous loiterers and recalcitrant inmates alongside fleeting stars and the more enduringly famous....Wayward Lives is thrilling to read because it invents a genre as deft and adventurous as the lives it chronicles."
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"Kaleidoscopic....In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems....The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy—not only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share."
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"Genre-bending literary history....These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom."
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"Brilliant....A virtuosic work of scholarship that recovers fragments of the lives of women who were supposed to be forgotten. As a result of her formidable research, stunning erudition, translucent prose and bold imagination, Saidiya Hartman reanimates their lives. Readers will not be able to forget them. They will also learn much about the social forces that enabled and constrained their struggle to live in beauty and freedom."
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"A radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of ‘ordinary’ young Black women....As is r