Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Saidiya Hartman
(Author)
Allyson Johnson
(Read by)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
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, 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. 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 re-creates 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.
Product Details
Price
$24.99
$23.24
Publisher
HighBridge Audio
Publish Date
April 09, 2019
Dimensions
0.0 X 0.0 X 0.0 inches | 0.0 pounds
Language
English
Type
MP3 CD
EAN/UPC
9781665128643
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.
Allyson Johnson began her entertainment career in her hometown of Chicago as an Emmy Award-winning child news anchor. A graduate of Brown University, she is a working actress, singer, and audiobook narrator in the New York City metropolitan area.
Reviews
"Genre-bending literary history....These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom."
-- "Elle""Exhilarating...A rich resurrection of a forgotten history."
-- "New York Times""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."
-- "New Republic""Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"