Hartman departs from a reliance on spectacular acts of resistance (marches, policy, etc.) and instead exalts the quotidian: lauding working-class Black women and GNC people in the early twentieth century who experimented with ways of being (“everyday anarchy”) that surpassed the stringent parameters of labor structured by the afterlife of slavery (vagrancy laws, segregation, etc.) Indeed, at this time in Northern cities 9/10 Black women worked as domestic workers and 1/3 of Black people worked as servants. To grant subjecthood to the dispossessed requires another mode of engagement. Personhood - rather than being a priori status - is produced by regimes of power. For Hartman, so much falls through the cracks if we rely on history’s emphasis on events and subjects. 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. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.īeautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them-domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty-and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live.

They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law.

Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century.

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