Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:
Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
Author: Saidiya Hartman
Published by: Serpent’s Tail
Pages: 390
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★★
Published by: Serpent’s Tail
Pages: 390
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★★
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize 2020.
At 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.
At 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.
My thoughts:
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recounts the experiments in social arrangements young black women conducted in New York and Philadelphia during the first decades of the twentieth century. The book focuses on the waves of Black youth who moved from the rural South to industrial northern cities in search of more fulfilling lives and documents the many challenges they faced.
Saidiya Hartman sifts through various shards of evidence to recreate the lives of primarily-urban, black women in early 20th-century America – with a focus on Philadelphia and New York.
This was selected as the June read for a local book club I attend in Bath. The book chronicles the ways in which many black women might have managed to find some element of freedom in their marginality, enabling them to suppress mainstream gender conventions, through their rejection of traditional family roles or their emphasis on sexual freedom.
It is a compelling feminist study with great substance and an impressive amount of research. I did however feel that much of the book felt unnecessarily drawn out, which is mainly why I’m giving it three stars.
There was a lot of content repetition: themes were hammered when they could have been deftly built and then nailed down. As a result, this felt like the sort of book that I would have been delighted to have assigned to me at university but falls short of being an accessible read. I think the accessibility could have been greatly improved with a tighter and more concise edit. The book arguably also needed to include several trigger warnings for some of the content.
Deep down I was really wanting this to be more of a lively and hopeful read. Admittedly I am very much a mood reader, and maybe my comments are partly because it’s summer and I was hoping for a more upbeat read for book club this month: something to take with me on a walk to the park or sit with on a sandy beach and feel excited to keep turning the pages. Instead, Hartman's writing demands close attention and inspection as the sentences here are often things to be savoured and dissected. It is beautifully written, but I was falling in and out of love with it as it progressed.
The book is written in quite a unique style for a history book. At times it feels like a series of literary short stories. The style is engaging and I liked it a lot at first, but occasionally it made it difficult to follow the narrative. However, the information and insights in Wayward Dreams, Beautiful Experiments are absolutely worth receiving, even if I found it to be a bit of a puzzle to make it all fit together.
Overall reaction:
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recounts the experiments in social arrangements young black women conducted in New York and Philadelphia during the first decades of the twentieth century. The book focuses on the waves of Black youth who moved from the rural South to industrial northern cities in search of more fulfilling lives and documents the many challenges they faced.
Saidiya Hartman sifts through various shards of evidence to recreate the lives of primarily-urban, black women in early 20th-century America – with a focus on Philadelphia and New York.
This was selected as the June read for a local book club I attend in Bath. The book chronicles the ways in which many black women might have managed to find some element of freedom in their marginality, enabling them to suppress mainstream gender conventions, through their rejection of traditional family roles or their emphasis on sexual freedom.
It is a compelling feminist study with great substance and an impressive amount of research. I did however feel that much of the book felt unnecessarily drawn out, which is mainly why I’m giving it three stars.
There was a lot of content repetition: themes were hammered when they could have been deftly built and then nailed down. As a result, this felt like the sort of book that I would have been delighted to have assigned to me at university but falls short of being an accessible read. I think the accessibility could have been greatly improved with a tighter and more concise edit. The book arguably also needed to include several trigger warnings for some of the content.
Deep down I was really wanting this to be more of a lively and hopeful read. Admittedly I am very much a mood reader, and maybe my comments are partly because it’s summer and I was hoping for a more upbeat read for book club this month: something to take with me on a walk to the park or sit with on a sandy beach and feel excited to keep turning the pages. Instead, Hartman's writing demands close attention and inspection as the sentences here are often things to be savoured and dissected. It is beautifully written, but I was falling in and out of love with it as it progressed.
The book is written in quite a unique style for a history book. At times it feels like a series of literary short stories. The style is engaging and I liked it a lot at first, but occasionally it made it difficult to follow the narrative. However, the information and insights in Wayward Dreams, Beautiful Experiments are absolutely worth receiving, even if I found it to be a bit of a puzzle to make it all fit together.
Overall reaction: