Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
United States

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

by Saidiya V. Hartman

Freedom & Resistance Non-Fiction History Feminist Fiction 2020

Summary

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.

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Country
United States
North America
About the author
Saidiya V. Hartman
Saidiya V. Hartman

Saidiya V. Hartman is an American scholar, cultural historian, and writer born in New York City in 1961. She is a professor at Columbia University, where her work explores the history and afterlives of slavery, the African diaspora, and the experiences of Black women. Combining archival research, literary criticism, and imaginative storytelling, Hartman has developed a distinctive approach to recovering lives and experiences that conventional historical records have often overlooked. Her influential books include Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). In her writing, Hartman examines how historical violence shapes contemporary life while exploring resistance, freedom, intimacy, and the possibilities of imagining lives beyond oppression. Her innovative method, which she calls critical fabulation, blends historical evidence with carefully framed speculation to illuminate the lives of people left at the margins of the archive.

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Details
Published
2020
Author
Saidiya V. Hartman