wayward lives beautiful experiments by saidiya hartman

Book Three, ‘Beautiful Experiments’, begins with a discussion of wayward minor laws, legislation that aimed to curb social disorder and that ultimately marked blackness as disorderly and criminal (p. The result is a layered account of the choreography of black existence, where alternative intimate arrangements are constantly sidestepping and dipping out of view of the law. In Book Two, ‘The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt’, Hartman picks up the threads of various characters to follow the map of their desires. While DuBois documents deviance in black social life, Hartman celebrates the radically different forms of kinship and intimacy in the ghetto (DuBois, 2007). DuBois’s sociological study of ‘the Negro Problem’ in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The chapters in this section construct a powerful juxtaposition to W.E.B.

Book One, ‘She Makes an Errant Path through the City’, inaugurates the radical possibility of the ghetto, found in forms of experimentation in which young black women engaged with one another, with intimate arrangements, and with the limits of the law. The twenty chapters that comprise Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments are divided into three books. By weaving together this cast of characters, Hartman is able to produce a narrative of rebellious practices that took shape in ghetto streets, rented rooms, and dance halls. Wells, Gladys Bentley, and Jackie Mabley – and even occupy space in the official historical accounts of the period. Other characters have names – such as Ida B. Some of these women lack names – Girl #1 ‘wanders through the streets of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward and New York’s Tenderloin’, and ‘the Chorus’ refers to ‘all the unnamed women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty’ (p. And yet, in finding new ways to live against, under, and despite these modes of control, Hartman’s young black female visionaries enacted their freedom as a rejoinder to anti-blackness. These conditions constituted a pervasive climate of anti-blackness. They consistently found new ways to live, new ways to be alive, in the face of economic exclusion, material deprivation, racial enclosure, and social dispossession thrust upon black intimate life.

Hartman’s book uncovers revolutionary potential in the everyday practices that animated the lives of these women.

Wayward lives beautiful experiments by saidiya hartman