Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

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Product Details
Price
$17.95  $16.69
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date
Pages
464
Dimensions
5.4 X 8.2 X 1.2 inches | 0.8 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780393357622

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About the Author
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and Lose Your Mother. She was a professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, prior to joining the faculty of Columbia University, where she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She received a MacArthur fellowship in 2019. She lives in New York City.
Reviews
Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed.--MacArthur Foundation
Kaleidoscopic.... In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems.... The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy--not only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share.--Joanna Scutts
Genre-bending literary history.... These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom.--Kat Stoeffel
Brilliant.... A virtuosic work of scholarship that recovers fragments of the lives of women who were supposed to be forgotten. As a result of her formidable research, stunning erudition, translucent prose and bold imagination, Saidiya Hartman reanimates their lives. Readers will not be able to forget them. They will also learn much about the social forces that enabled and constrained their struggle to live in beauty and freedom.--Cheryl A. Wall
This is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility.... [A] gorgeous, heartbreaking triumph of a book.--Daphne A. Brooks
A profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory.... A bravely wayward, unflinchingly hybrid book, perhaps best described as halfway between the novel and documentary history, but more than anything else it leaves me curious about where Saidiya Hartman's thinking will take us next.--Jess Row
I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved....[Hartman's] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details.--Leslie Jamison