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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. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, 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. 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. 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. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives re-creates 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.… (more)
Media reviews
Her experiments with orality and audial text throughout beg for portions of it to be read aloud. Hartman creates sonorous lists at a legato pace that literally give voice to the centrality of movement as the physical expression to be freed.
She calls upon us to look at the lives of those who are on the bottom of the social hierarchy: How do they move, what gives them pleasure and not just pain, and most importantly, what do they want? How do we read resistance from the mundanity and alienation of life under capitalism as an actual desire to be free?