Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

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Saidiya Hartman: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.)

464 pages

English language

Published Jan. 13, 2019 by Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W..

ISBN:
978-0-393-28568-0
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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.

7 editions

Subjects

  • African american women
  • African american youth
  • Women, sexual behavior
  • Single women
  • Urban women
  • Sex customs
  • Prostitution
  • United states, social conditions
  • Man-woman relationships