Overview

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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9780393285673

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Saidiya Hartman is a giant among American thinkers. No one else sees like she sees; her scholarly vision is uneclipsed. With the power of her mighty intellect, she creates ideas that illuminate and haunt. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is another singular, unforgettable Hartman achievement. -- Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Light of the World A masterpiece...The wayward lives and beautiful experiments in which Hartman is interested can only be described...by joining the experiment, by engaging in its hard-won freedoms, its autonomous profligacies, its shifting directions...A truly great and groundbreaking book. -- Fred Moten, coauthor of The Undercommons and author of The Feel Trio A love song to the wayward, a riotous poem, a lyrical homage to the minor...This book changes everything. -- Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure [Hartman] uses the weapons of lyric and literature to steal `colored women' away from the grasp of white lawmen and the clinical gaze, and along the way gives history what it lacks and wants-black women as secret agents of destiny, deep lives from the unnamed crowd, and underground sinners as the true sponsors of social change. -- Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family Wayward Lives is a series of adventure stories that takes the reader through the travails and triumphs of a multitude of black women as they negotiate the perilous path of self-discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. In her impeccably researched new book, Hartman breathes glorious life into these true survival tales with the precision and invention of a master storyteller. -- Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweat and Ruined A startling, dazzling act of resurrection...Hartman has granted these forgotten, `wayward' women a new life...[She] challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional-whole people-who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all. -- Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Ambitious, original...a beautiful experiment in its own right. -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Wayward Lives unsorts the archive looking for the errant, the unruly, the gorgeously disarranged paths of fugitive black girls. Fleeing from respectability, the good, the right and the true, the black girls that interest Hartman are everyday revolutionaries or what she calls `chorines, bulldaggers, aesthetical negroes, socialists, lady lovers, pansies and anarchists.' This book is a love song to the wayward, a riotous poem, a lyrical homage to the minor. It changes the way we do history, the way we constitute the political, and makes resistance newly visible in the ordinary. This book changes everything. -- Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure A masterpiece....The wayward lives and beautiful experiments in which Professor Hartman is interested can only be described and illuminated in wayward and experimental ways-not in analytic detachment but by joining the experiment, by engaging in its hard-won freedoms, its autonomous profligacies, its shifting directions....Hartman radically reimagines the very idea of the portrait....A truly great and groundbreaking book. -- Fred Moten, professor of performance studies, New York University Saidiya Hartman is a giant among American thinkers. No one else sees like she sees; her scholarly vision is uneclipsed. With the power of her mighty intellect, she creates ideas that illuminate and haunt. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is another singular, unforgettable Hartman achievement. -- Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Light of the World Saidiya Hartman tells a mesmerizing story with a multitude of women as its heroines, lifting up invisible black seekers within the cities of one hundred years ago to the light of memory and tribute. She uses the weapons of lyric and literature to steal `colored women' away from the grasp of white lawmen and the clinical gaze, and along the way gives history what it lacks and wants-black women as secret agents of destiny, deep lives from the unnamed crowd, and underground sinners as the true sponsors of social change. -- Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family With urgency and compassion, Hartman rescues the lives of young black women from the margins of history. Wayward Lives is a series of adventure stories that take the reader through the travails and triumphs of a multitude of black women, as they negotiate the perilous path of self-discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. In her impeccably researched new book, Hartman breathes glorious life into these true survival tales with the precision and invention of a master storyteller. -- Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweat and Ruined Wayward Lives is a startling, dazzling act of resurrection. In this stunning tapestry, Saidiya Hartman has granted these forgotten, `wayward' women a new life. These remarkable black women were shamed, scorned, criminalized, studied, diagnosed and then erased from history. Yet now, Hartman challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional-whole people-who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all. -- Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Ambitious, original...a beautiful experiment in its own right, to be set beside the many attempts at living free that Hartman here chronicles with a keen sense of history, imagination, and love. -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Saidiya Hartman tells a mesmerizing story with a multitude of women as its heroines, lifting up invisible black seekers within the cities of one hundred years ago to the light of memory and tribute. She uses the weapons of lyric and literature to steal `colored women' away from the grasp of white lawmen and the clinical gaze, and along the way gives history the things it lacks and wants-black women as secret agents of destiny, deep lives from the unnamed crowd, and underground sinners as the true sponsors of social change. -- Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family

The book shines in its details of individuals...who fought against an unfair and racist system. -- Library Journal An insightful feminist reassessment of a key era in American history. -- Booklist Lucid and original-of considerable interest to students of the African-American diaspora and American social and cultural history. -- Kirkus Saidiya Hartman is a giant among American thinkers. No one else sees like she sees; her scholarly vision is uneclipsed. With the power of her mighty intellect, she creates ideas that illuminate and haunt. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is another singular, unforgettable Hartman achievement. -- Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Light of the World A masterpiece...The wayward lives and beautiful experiments in which Hartman is interested can only be described...by joining the experiment, by engaging in its hard-won freedoms, its autonomous profligacies, its shifting directions...A truly great and groundbreaking book. -- Fred Moten, coauthor of The Undercommons and author of The Feel Trio A love song to the wayward, a riotous poem, a lyrical homage to the minor...This book changes everything. -- Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure [Hartman] uses the weapons of lyric and literature to steal `colored women' away from the grasp of white lawmen and the clinical gaze, and along the way gives history what it lacks and wants-black women as secret agents of destiny, deep lives from the unnamed crowd, and underground sinners as the true sponsors of social change. -- Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family Wayward Lives is a series of adventure stories that takes the reader through the travails and triumphs of a multitude of black women as they negotiate the perilous path of self-discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. In her impeccably researched new book, Hartman breathes glorious life into these true survival tales with the precision and invention of a master storyteller. -- Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweat and Ruined A startling, dazzling act of resurrection...Hartman has granted these forgotten, `wayward' women a new life...[She] challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional-whole people-who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all. -- Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Ambitious, original...a beautiful experiment in its own right. -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Author Information

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother, Scenes of Subjection. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.

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