This book is an actualization of Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” a practice of historical speculation that coalesces the magic of literature with the methodology of history in order to respond to deliberate absences in the archive. It is one of the most compelling feminist studies I have read. Hartman as one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires, their unfinished revolution in a minor key. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance. 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. 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. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These women refused to labour like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Their defeats were bitter, but their triumphs became the blueprint for a world that was waiting to be born.
The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. 'Exhilarating.A rich resurrection of a forgotten history' The New York TimesĪt the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. 'A startling, dazzling act of resurrection' Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
a beautiful experiment in its own right' Maggie Nelson
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