Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Bookitis Pick

Cover for Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Image source: Open Library

aziza ennaouiSaidiya V. HartmanAllyson Johnson9 editions

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.

Search books Open lead author

Overview

Shared work-level identity and catalog context.

3 credited authorsSearch language english

Bookitis keeps work pages focused on the shared book identity and the editions that actually belong to it. Unrelated books should not appear here as primary content.

Contributors

People credited with this work in the active catalog.

aziza ennaoui
Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog
Open Author
Saidiya V. Hartman
Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog
Open Author
Allyson Johnson
Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog
Open Author

Editions

Publication-specific versions linked to this work only.