Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals

Saidiya Hartman

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.


 


Details

ISBN: 9781788163248
Genre: Black Interest; History; LGBT Studies/Social Sciences
Subject: History / Social History; History / United States / General
Publication Date: 2021-03-04
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Rating:
Notes: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020
Book_ID: 259144

Author: NorthShore Noir Press