Parul Sehgal * New York Times *Īmbitious, original. rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension.This kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time. This is scholarship as art * New Inquiry *Įxhilarating.A rich resurrection of a forgotten history. Leslie Jamison * New York Times Book Review * mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details. I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved. She basically invents a new genre - Carmen Maria Machado * New Statesman * Infuses the history of black women and queer radicals with incredible life and urgency. She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns - Claudia Rankine

One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers. Publisher: Profile Books Ltd ISBN: 9781788163248 Number of pages: 416 Weight: 320 g Dimensions: 198 x 128 x 28 mm Edition: Main MEDIA REVIEWS With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance. 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. 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. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These women refused to labour like slaves. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020Īt the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

Hartman wayward lives