Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (eBook)

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.

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

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

Fantastic, really amazing ... daring

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.

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

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

This is scholarship as art

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.

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.

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