The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
…exhilarating…Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a rich resurrection of a forgotten history, which is Hartman's specialty…Her rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension. Hartman is a sleuth of the archive; she draws extensively from plantation documents, missionary tracts, whatever traces she can find—but she is vocal about the challenge of using such troubling documents, the risk one runs of reinscribing their authority. Similarly, she is keen to identify moments of defiance and joy in the lives of her subjects, but is wary of the "obscene" project to revise history, to insist upon autonomy where there may have been only survival, "to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration." Hartman is most original in her approach to gaps in a story, which she shades in with speculation and sometimes fictional imagining—a technique she has used in all her work but never quite so fully as in this new book…She pushes past the social workers, the psychologists, the policemen and the scandalized moralists standing in our way to reveal the women for the first time, individual and daring.
Publishers Weekly
★ 02/25/2019
In this lyrical and novelistic speculative history, Hartman (Lose Your Mother), a Columbia University professor of English and comparative literature, reconstructs the lives of unknown black female urban rebels from the early 20th century, everyday women whose existences are hinted at by court records, social workers’ notes, and photographs and who she heralds as “radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live.” The photos (taken between 1890 and 1935) inspired the book, and each chapter is anchored by one, around which is woven a vignette about the inner experience of the woman depicted, sometimes zooming out to encompass whole parties or streets or neighborhoods, sometimes intersecting with historical figures of note such as sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, suffragist and NAACP cofounder Mary White Ovington, or actress Edna Thomas. Hartman wonders about and imagines her subjects’ lives between the archival lines in vivid detail. Taken together, the affectionate and reverent reconstructions add up to a picture of black urban women’s courage, their attempts to carve out freedom, love, autonomy, power, and pleasure in socially constrained circumstances: “A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom.” This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement. (Feb.)
Michelle Alexander
"A startling, dazzling act of resurrection…Hartman has granted these forgotten, ‘wayward’ women a new life…[She] challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional—whole people—who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all."
Bookforum - Jess Row
"A profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory....A bravely wayward, unflinchingly hybrid book, perhaps best described as halfway between the novel and documentary history, but more than anything else it leaves me curious about where Saidiya Hartman’s thinking will take us next."
The Nation - Sam Huber
"Revelatory....The book's broad sweep, and its nimble pivoting among a range of scales and perspectives, make room for anonymous loiterers and recalcitrant inmates alongside fleeting stars and the more enduringly famous....Wayward Lives is thrilling to read because it invents a genre as deft and adventurous as the lives it chronicles."
New York Times - Parul Sehgal
"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."
Maggie Nelson
"Ambitious, original…a beautiful experiment in its own right."
Leslie Jamison
"I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved....[Hartman’s] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details."
New Republic - Joanna Scutts
"Kaleidoscopic....In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems....The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy—not only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share."
Times Higher Education - Cheryl A. Wall
"Brilliant....A virtuosic work of scholarship that recovers fragments of the lives of women who were supposed to be forgotten. As a result of her formidable research, stunning erudition, translucent prose and bold imagination, Saidiya Hartman reanimates their lives. Readers will not be able to forget them. They will also learn much about the social forces that enabled and constrained their struggle to live in beauty and freedom."
Elle - Kat Stoeffel
"Genre-bending literary history....These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
"A radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of ‘ordinary’ young Black women....As is redolent of all Hartman’s work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments offers a blistering critique of historical archives as the singular or even most authoritative source of credible knowledge....[She] implores us to pause and consider who is inside of and outside of the archive; whose voice is heard and whose voice is silenced; whose lives matter and whose lives to not."
Kirkus Reviews
2018-12-30
A provocative study of urban African-American women a century and more ago.
Characterizing her work as an "account of the wayward," literary scholar Hartman (English/Columbia Univ.; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 2007, etc.) examines the many ways in which (mostly) young black women tried to live their lives within the confines of new urban enclaves such as Harlem and West Philadelphia, from which Italian and Jewish immigrants had moved on and into which newcomers from the South were streaming. The population, writes the author, was young and in many cases disproportionately female, with liberating follow-on consequences. In one Philadelphia area, for instance, "more than half the women in the ward were single, widowed, or separated, and this imperiled the newly fledged black family"—imperiled it because so many of those unencumbered women were determined to live on their own terms, having begun a journey to freedom that was ongoing. They faced formidable resistance within their own communities even as they willingly took on new roles: "In bed," Hartman writes of one lesbian couple, "it seemed like it was only the two of them in the world, in the vast stillness of the deep of night. In the few hours before dusk, there were no husbands to fear." The author populates her pages with reformatory inmates, reformers, sex workers, and political activists such as Harlem Renaissance figure Claude McKay, "known less well for his indiscretions than for the ease and facility with which he cloaked them." Sometimes Hartman's rhetoric becomes a touch too high-flown, as if swept up in the exuberance of the fight for freedom, and interrogatives sometimes threaten to overwhelm declarative sentences. However, close attention to "beautiful experiments" and "the sexual geography of the black belt," as two section titles have it, yield new insight into the truth of a central proposition: "No modern intelligent person was content merely existing. Sometimes it was good to take a chance."
Lucid and original—of considerable interest to students of the African-American diaspora and American social and cultural history.
