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    Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
    Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
    Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
    Audiobook10 hours

    Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

    Written by Saidiya Hartman

    Narrated by Allyson Johnson

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    Editor's Note

    Radical reimaginings…

    Author and professor Saidiya Hartman brings to life the experiences of black female rebels who lived in US cities in the early 20th century, reconstructing their lives based on the footnotes of history books that otherwise ignored them. Calling them “radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live,” Hartman reveals the ways in which these women empowered themselves and subverted restrictive moral expectations of the time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 9, 2019
    ISBN9781684418749
    Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
    Author

    Saidiya Hartman

    Saidiya Hartman is a Columbia University professor of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author ofScenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). In 2019 Hartman was awarded a prestigious MacArthur 'Genius' grant.

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    • 5/5
      So many amazing unheard of stories for me that was a pleasure to hear and give insight into these various worlds.