Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020
 
At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. These women refused to labour like slaves. 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 twentieth 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.
 
Number of pages:
xxi, 390
Weight:
322g
Height:
130mm
Width:
198mm
Spine width:
39mm