Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Revolution in a minor key: how young black women invented freedom.

One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers ... She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns

Infuses the history of black women and queer radicals with incredible life and urgency. She basically invents a new genre

I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved....[Hartman's] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details.

This is scholarship as art

Exhilarating....A rich resurrection of a forgotten history....[Hartman's] 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.

Ambitious, original... a beautiful experiment in its own right, to be set beside the many attempts at living free that Hartman here chronicles with a keen sense of history, imagination, and love.

Wayward Lives is a startling, dazzling act of resurrection... These remarkable black women were shamed, scorned, criminalized, studied, diagnosed and then erased from history. Yet now, Hartman challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional-whole people - who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all.

With urgency and compassion, Hartman rescues the lives of young black women from the margins of history. Wayward Lives is a series of adventure stories that take the reader through the travails and triumphs of a multitude of black women, as they negotiate the perilous path of self-discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. In her impeccably researched new book, Hartman breathes glorious life into these true survival tales with the precision and invention of a master storyteller.

Fantastic, really amazing ... daring

A beautiful, meticulously researched exploration of the lives of Black girls whom early-20th-century laws designated as "wayward" for such crimes as having serial lovers, or an excess of desire, or a style of comportment that was outside white norms. From the few traces she uncovers in the historical record, Hartman manages to sketch moving portraits, restoring joy and freedom and movement to what, in other hands, might have been mere statistics

Wayward Lives unsorts the archive looking for the errant, the unruly, the gorgeously disarranged paths of fugitive black girls. Fleeing from respectability, the good, the right and the true, the black girls that interest Hartman are everyday revolutionaries or what she calls 'chorines, bulldaggers, aesthetical negroes, socialists, lady lovers, pansies and anarchists.' This book is a love song to the wayward, a riotous poem, a lyrical homage to the minor. It changes the way we do history, the way we constitute the political, and makes resistance newly visible in the ordinary. This book changes everything.

Saidiya Hartman tells a mesmerizing story with a multitude of women as its heroines, lifting up invisible black seekers within the cities of one hundred years ago to the light of memory and tribute. She uses the weapons of lyric and literature to steal 'colored women' away from the grasp of white lawmen and the clinical gaze, and along the way gives history what it lacks and wants-black women as secret agents of destiny, deep lives from the unnamed crowd, and underground sinners as the true sponsors of social change.

A masterpiece... The wayward lives and beautiful experiments in which Professor Hartman is interested can only be described and illuminated in wayward and experimental ways-not in analytic detachment but by joining the experiment, by engaging in its hard-won freedoms, its autonomous profligacies, its shifting directions... Hartman radically reimagines the very idea of the portrait... A truly great and groundbreaking book.

Lyrical and novelistic....This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement

How to honour the soft liquid rigour, the sharp vast tenderness, of a writer like Saidiya Hartman? ... For those of us who turn to the archive seeking comfort, looking for old ways of looking at new things, for redress to our subjugated history - this book is a balm and a pedagogic tool. Wayward Lives is a book that wants you to live.

Lyrical and highly readable ... Hartman opens a window onto a form of resistance less well documented than the protests led by organised labour and civil rights campaigners

Saidiya Hartman is a Columbia University professor of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007). In 2019, Hartman was awarded a prestigious MacArthur 'Genius' Grant.