Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Written by Saidiya Hartman
Narrated by Allyson Johnson
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
Editor's Note
Radical reimaginings…
Author and professor Saidiya Hartman brings to life the experiences of black female rebels who lived in US cities in the early 20th century, reconstructing their lives based on the footnotes of history books that otherwise ignored them. Calling them “radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live,” Hartman reveals the ways in which these women empowered themselves and subverted restrictive moral expectations of the time.
Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and Lose Your Mother. She was a professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, prior to joining the faculty of Columbia University, where she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She received a MacArthur fellowship in 2019. She lives in New York City.
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Reviews for Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
54 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5So many amazing unheard of stories for me that was a pleasure to hear and give insight into these various worlds.