wayward lives beautiful experiments sparknotes

mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details. I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved. 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. She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns - Claudia RankineĮxhilarating.A rich resurrection of a forgotten history. One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers. Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires, their unfinished revolution in a minor key. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance. 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. 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. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These women refused to labour like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.

Their defeats were bitter, but their triumphs became the blueprint for a world that was waiting to be born. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. a beautiful experiment in its own right' Maggie Nelson 'A startling, dazzling act of resurrection' Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow 'Exhilarating.A rich resurrection of a forgotten history' The New York Times At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. WINNER OF THE PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR A JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020 WINNER OF A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD BY THE RECIPIENT OF A MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT 'Ambitious, original.

Wayward lives beautiful experiments sparknotes