wayward lives beautiful experiments review

Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed. Revelatory.… Wayward Lives is thrilling to read because it invents a genre as deft and adventurous as the lives it chronicles. Leslie Jamison - The New York Times Book Review I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved.… mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.

Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. 'Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history.' -Parul Sehgal, New York Timesīeautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Winner of the 2020 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfictionįinalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography

Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

Wayward lives beautiful experiments review