Access Instantly Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories Of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, And Queer Radicals Fashioned By Saidiya Hartman Provided As Paper Edition

there is a bunch of idiots who are protesting the teaching of Critical Race Theory in kschools, where, in fact, it is not being taught at all.
What these idiots who are mostly likely really racists are protesting is the teaching of American history in all its highs and lows and the inclusion of people who are not white as well as the fact that racism was and still is.

Hartmans book is part of this needed correction to how history was taught in many years, It is important to know and to understand how certain segments of our population were/are treated by society at large.
This includes people of color, women, and the LQBITQ groups as well as others, It includes acknowledging that say the Kennedy experience of America is vastly different than that of say Ida B, Wells.
Hartmans recent book might not be a history book in the traditional sense of the term, Given her subject matter complete historical records are not something that would be available, In the book, Hartman reconstructs, as much as she can, the lives of Black Women, lower class black women, in NYC and Philadelphia during the earlys.

Hartmans focus is primarily on those women who lived outside the constricting lines that society largely white drew to contain them.
Yet these women, in a variety of ways, rebelled against those constrictions, These are the women who because they were black, female, and poor did not make it into the history books,
Yet to not the history that their lives representations is to have an incomplete picture of not only the history of Black women in America in particular, the history of women in American in general but also of racism.

In her beautiful prose, Hartman chronicles the lives of women who had multiple relationships but who were not prostitutes, of women who lived as men, lesbians, those who found themselves confined to reformatory centers because of behavior deemed “immoral”.

While not a history in a traditional sense, particularly in the detailing of the individual stories take for instance the story of the naked Black girl in a Eakins photo.
There is no hard proof for what Hartman speculates, though her speculation is backed by the fact of Eakins abuse of women.
Her placement of women in the larger historic and social tapestry, in particular in regards to the actual numbers of women w ho were sent to reformatories or who where charged is strong enough support that her freely acknowledged suppositions most likely are correct.

This book is an engrossing look at those women history wants to disregard and forget,
A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century,

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, commonlaw 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 centuryold 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 themdomestic service, secondclass citizenship, and respectable povertyand 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, A book that I feel like more people should read because of the unique historical context to archival records that it provides, while also remaining extremely culturally relevant in terms of police violence, racial and gender discrimination, and how hard Black women work to make their own spaces and be heard.
Definitely points out important gaps in the archival record and the way we talk about American history, This is a difficult book to summarizeit is an often poetic rendering of the horrors of racism, primarily in New York City at around the turn of the last century.
I felt particularly saddened and horrified by the viciousness of the racism in my own city, by the gratuitous cruelty and targeted punitive actions taken by both institutions and individuals.


But Hartman relays these horrors in the context of individuals attempting to find a way to live and be true to themselves in an extremely hostile environment.
As black women, many of whom are gay, they have few rights or protections but still a powerful longing to be free and live their lives passionately and fully, even when all that is wanted is to be simply left alone to love and live.


The book begins with a chorus describing life in the tenements and slums, The people are interchangeable. As the book goes on the lens focuses in on individuals, I was delayed and often sidetracked as I paused to find out more about the real people who appearGladys Bentley, a singer and piano player, a gay woman who dared to perform wearing men's clothes, Moms Mabley whom I remembered hearing in my childhood and other actresses, singers, businesswomen and more.
And contrasted with the successful womensome of whom, despite their talents and success still died in destitution are the stories of the unfamous.
Women who served time in the nightmare of the Bedford Hills reformatory, where they were continuously illtreated and tortured, Their crime Wayward behaviornot listening to parents, being seen with men not their husbands, behaviors that indicated to the current powersthatbe that they a disproportionate share of whom were black were headed in the direction of criminality.
For the possibility of future criminal behaviorand that behavior being prostitutionthey were sent away for three years,

These are stories of continual resistance to a world that rejected, subjugated, controlled and in every way worked to prevent black women from simply being themselves.


A beautifully written and passionate work, I have both too much and truly not enough to say about this work this bold, marvelous project so I'll suffice with what is the easiest: everyone should read Saidiya Hartman.
Theres something neararchaeological in the way Saidiya Hartmans sifts through shards of evidence to recreate the lives of primarilyurban, black women in earlythcentury America with a focus on Philadelphia and New York.
Hartmans exceptionally creative nonfiction intense, episodic, intimate draws on a range of sources:

”the journals of rent collectors surveys and monographs of sociologists trial transcripts slum photographs reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists and prison case files”

But Hartman doesnt simply review or analyse the material she gathers, she strives to look beyond the judgemental conclusions of those documenting black communities to the actual people concealed within their dry studies.
Studies that labelled black women and girls as unruly problems, deviants, objects of scrutiny, The women themselves rarely speak, they were often unable to read or write or just not given the space to voice their own ideas but Hartmans vision transforms these elusive, missing figures into fullyrealised subjects refusing to bend to the white worlds expectations, doing their best to pursue their own dreams, plans, and beliefs.
She imagines their thoughts and feelings, what their daily experiences might have been as they faced down prejudice, poverty and violence, and she turns her gaze on the ones who studied them too: philanthropic white women with an urge to save the fallen W.
E. B. Dubois in his brief time compiling reports on the black, urban poor of Philadelphia, confused and conflicted by the feelings they, and particularly the women, arouse.


Hartman chronicles the

ways in which many black women might have managed to find some element of freedom in their marginality enabling them to subvert mainstream gender conventions, through their rejection of traditional family roles or their insistence on sexual freedom or their embrace of different ways of living: like actress Edna Lewis Thomas whose relationship with photographer Lady Olivia Wyndham lasted for years or Gladys Bentley who spurned gender boundaries.
But Hartman also acknowledges that these tenuous freedoms and rebellion came at a price, becoming the site of a series of moral panics over the socalled licentious, immoral lifestyles of urban black women and subject to numerous attempts by white society to make black women toe the line including rigid forms of policing simply being out late at night could lead to arrest and imprisonment for assumed solicitation.
Harsh policies justified by claims that:

”Black women yielded more easily to the temptations of the city than any other girls,”because negroes as a grouphad not been brought under social control.
Policy makers and reformers insisted they were “several generations behind the AngloSaxon race in civilising agencies and processes, ” For this reason they were in need of greater regulation, ”

Hartmans inventive, impressionistic, fluid approach to interpreting the archive has solid underpinnings drawing on the work of academics like Hazel Carby and frameworks from cultural studies such as Roland Barthess ideas about image and meaning.
I found Hartmans book fascinating and powerful although her decision to foreground storytelling over the factual could be a little bewildering at times I sometimes had to check on the background, timelines and context for the places and people shes talking about here.
Hartman also raises important questions about how we recover lost histories or resurrect voices that were silenced or just never heard, or understand the intricate realities and everyday, social interactions of communities who were continually held to account but rarely allowed to account for themselves.
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