Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals [Paperback]

Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved.&[Hartman's] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details. Revelatory.& Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed. Kaleidoscopic.& In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems.& The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathynot only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share. Genre-bending literary history.& These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom. Brilliant.& A virtuosic work of scholarship that recovers fragments of the lives of women who were supposed to be forgotten. As a result of her formidable research, stunning erudition, translucent prose and bold imagination, Saidiya Hartman reanimates their lives. Readers will not be able to forget them. They will also learn much about the social forces that enabled and constrained their struggle to live in beauty and freedom. A radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of ordinary young Black women.& As is redolent of all Hartmans work, This is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility.& [A] gorgeous, heartbreaking triumph of a book. A profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory.& A bravely wayward, unflinchingly hybrid book, perhaps best described as halfway between the novel and documentary history, but more than anything else it leaves me curious about where Saidiya Hartmans thinking will take us next. Weaving in and out of disclãÈ