WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS, intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women and queer radicals

390pp., illus., paperback, Reprint, Serpent's Tail, London (2019) 2021

ISBN: 9781788163248

Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Saidiya Hartman on the intimate lives of black women in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.

"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." Cheryl A. Wall, former Professor of English, Rutgers University

"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 do not." Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Los Angeles Review of Books

Saidiya Hartman is Professor at Columbia University and the author of Lose Your Mother:  A journey along the Atlantic slave route and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth century America. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar.