Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Image for Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
Click to enlarge
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
by Saidiya Hartman (Author)
Format:Paperback / softback 416 pages, Black and white photos throughout
Publisher:Profile Books Ltd
Imprint:Serpent's Tail
Edition:Main
ISBN:9781788163248
Published:4 Mar 2021
Classifications:USA, c 1900 - c 1914, Social & cultural history, Gender studies: women, Black & Asian studies
Weight:338g
Dimensions:130 x 198 x 39 (mm)
Pub. Country:United Kingdom
Country of Origin:GB
Tariff Codes:49019900
For sale in:    United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Germany, France, (See full list)
Other Formats
 Paperback / softback
Description
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 100 BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020'Exhilarating ... A rich resurrection of forgotten history' The New York TimesAt 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.