Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women Queer

Revolution in a minor key: how young black women invented freedom.

About the author

Saidiya Hartman is a Columbia University professor of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author ofScenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). In 2019 Hartman was awarded a prestigious MacArthur 'Genius' grant.

Summary

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020

'Exhilarating ... A rich resurrection of forgotten history' The New York Times

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.

Foreword

MacArthur 'genius' Saidiya Hartman pushes historical methods to the limit to imagine the lives of America's first free black women

Product details

• Authors: Saidiya Hartman, Hartman Saidiya
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.01.2021
• EAN: 9781788163248
• ISBN: 978-1-78816-324-8
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 25 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Society; USA, Ethnic Studies, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, Social and cultural history, United States of America, USA, Gender studies: women, Gender studies: women and girls, Black & Asian Studies, C 1900 - C 1914, c 1900 to c 1909, Relating to African American / Black American people