Review of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (W. W. Norton & Company)

Abstract

This review considers how <i>Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval</i> poses a challenge to the reader. The invitation is to stay immersed within the everyday lives of Black women and girls, who navigated the terrains of New York City and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, without fleeting into spectacle or pathology. One may assume that such is an effortless proposition that is carried simply by the desire to think about Black women. However, Hartman tacitly demonstrates that a tremendous counter-historiography must be amassed to write the stories of those who have been underwritten by the tales of politics, great Black men, shining Black starlets, or the widely pathologized Black female figure. Thus, <i>Wayward Lives</i> weaves together a beautiful narrative of the social upheaval of Black women and girls at the dawning of Northern urban space, and what would later become known as the Black ghetto. At the same time, Hartman exposes the limits of the official record and narratives which relegate the lives of Black women as tertiary, as opposed to an integral political history in its own right.