Download PDF Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman 9780393285673 Books

Product details Hardcover 304 pages Publisher W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (February 19, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0393285677

Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman 9780393285673 Books Reviews

• Beyond disrespectful to the woman pictured on the cover. They do not mention her name in the cover design. She is mentioned only twice, briefly, in the book and the author doesn't seem to know her name as it is misspelled in the index. She is the great Aida Overton Walker. Don't call it "women's studies" if you don't actually study the women and don't treat them with the respect they deserve.
• The turn of the century was truly a momentous period in American history. Reconstruction had come to an end, and so too had any federal government investment in realizing the promise of Black citizenship; Jim Crow regimes grew and consolidated their power while extra-legal lynching proliferated. Immigration from Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America made and remade race; the fight for women's suffrage continued, and "women's rights" were continually reasserted as something to which only middle and upper-middle-class white women could claim; urbanization pulled folks from the rural areas to the city; the Spanish-American War raged on, and the U.S. empire expanded its reach. And this is only the tip of the iceberg— the turn of the century was a transformative time.
  
  In 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,' Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider the lives of Black women migrants during this period, those who had fled the racial terror of the South to encounter a different form of racial terror in the North. As Hartman so beautifully puts it, their lives were "marked by negation, but exceed it." So how do we witness the excess? What were their dreams? How and who did they love? What were their hopes? How did they "make do" in the midst of so little? What gave them pleasure? What made them laugh? What made them cry? Did they aspire to motherhood or reject it? When the archival records on these women point us to social workers' case files, psychologists’ evaluations, prison records, trial documents, and sociological studies that described them as *problems*, where do we look to answer these questions (and others)?
  
  Hartman has "resisted the tyranny of genre," pushed the boundaries of discipline, and the limits of the archive in this book. When there are gaps in the archive, when the individuals or groups who are the focus live in the gaps themselves, we have to become creative and even more rigorous in our historical reconstructions. Hartman uses deep archival research, literary fiction, music, poetry, and theory from various disciplines to speculate and imagine. I want to be very clear here--this is not a work of historical fiction. Every vignette, every portrait is true. This is a historian's generous offering. What speculation and imaginative readings allow Hartman to do, however, is provide a fullness, an interiority, an agency and autonomy to these women's lives, characteristics that academics, social workers, lawyers, judges, urban planners, etc. denied them. Like so much of Hartman's work, 'Wayward Lives' explores the "afterlife of slavery" in immense detail, and it does so with rigor, care, caution, critique, and magnificent intellect. The text is also a really masterful lesson on method--on how to engage archives, on how to read them, on how to explore, research, and investigate with breadth and depth. It poses a new methodological and analytical framework for current and future historians of "the wayward," the marginalized and the dominated, and encourages us to be bolder and more attentive in our work. Astonishing indeed.
• Wayward Lives is a MUST read. As the NYT Book Review says, it's exhilarating, fascinating, and beautifully written. pairs it with Toni Morrison's newest collection, and they're a perfect combo.
• This will for me be like Toni Morrison's Songs of Solomon and Alice Walker's Temple of my Familiar a book I will read over and over and each time it will be as if the first. The writing is as dedicated to the scholarly as it is to yhe fiction. Genius in its research. In it I found my grandmother I never met, and revisited my aunt I adored, institutionalized for daring to need to be free. Unfortunately we still have vestiges of the misunderstanding of non white women who dare to be ordinary, normal. Ms Hartman has added to the books written by and about African American women that have been missing. The books we yearn to read but have not been written do we must write them ourselves. The research is aggressive and brilliant. Where there are gaps, she creates the fillers. I thank her for her descriptive prose of the beauty of the the black women then snd now.
• I learned a lot reading this book. The author does a wonderful job with uncovering the lives of African American Women living their lives in Northern Cities. It is important that these stories are no longer forgotten. I loved the historic photographs that accompanied the text. Anyone with an interest in women's history should read this book.
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is majestic. In Hartman's text, poor Black girls and women are shown as theorists, philosophers, artists, anarchists, and aesthetes engaged in practices of refusal and world making. These women crafted beautiful experiments in living in the face of the full violence of white supremacy and antiblackness; they insisted on carrying on "as if they were free." This is a deeply researched and truly important book.
• I can't put this book down. It' beautifully written and deeply, extensively researched. It is itself a "beautiful experiment" in constructing new knowledge of the experience of black women.