Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

SHORTLISTED FOR A JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020 WINNER OF A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WRTTEN BY THE RECIPIENT OF A MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. They refused to labour like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood - all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the 20th century, though they set the pattern for the world to come. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.