These riveting works of nonfiction by two incredible women have powerful narratives on family, race, and the way we get to tell our stories. Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe compiles art and short vignettes into a beautiful work that explores the Black experience through a wide variety of themes. Sharpe joined us to talk about how […]
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
464Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
464Hardcover
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Overview
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.
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 and outside the bounds of law. 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 recreates 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. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780393285673 |
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Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
Publication date: | 02/19/2019 |
Pages: | 464 |
Sales rank: | 1,140,967 |
Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
A Note on Method xiii
Cast of Characters xvii
Book 1 She Makes An Errant Path Through The City
The Terrible Beauty of the Slum 3
A Minor Figure 13
An Unloved Woman 37
An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom 45
Manual for General Housework 71
An Atlas of the Wayward 81
A Chronicle of Need and Want 123
In a Moment of Tenderness the Future Seems Possible 155
Book 2 The Sexual Geography Of The Black Beit
1900. The Tenderloin. 241 West 41st Street 161
1909. 601 West 61st Stret. A New Colony of Colored People, OL-Malindy in Little Africa 177
Mistah Beauty, The Autobiography of an Fx Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s 193
Family Albums, Aborted futures: A Disillusioned Wife Becomes an Artist, 1890 Seventh Avenue 205
Book 3 Beautiful Experiments
Revolution in a Minor Key 217
Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible 227
The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner 229
The Arrested Life of Fva Perkins 257
Riot and Refrain 263
The Socialist Delivers a Lecture on Free Love 287
The Beauty of the Chorus 297
The Chorus Opens the Way 345
Acknowledgments 351
Notes 355
List of Illustrations 419
Index 425