Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Saidiya Hartman

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and new York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship 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 a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

status Copy #1 (3206): in
genre Activism and Human Rights » Feminism
publisher Norton
publish date 2019
popularity checked out 0 time(s)

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