A review by historicalmaterialgirl
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring slow-paced

4.75

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments takes such a moving and humanizing approach to telling the history of Black women at the turn of the 19th century. Where the archive sometimes provides little information, Hartman fills in the gaps with speculation that reveals and reaffirms the complexity, the personhood, the resistance, the desires, and the freedom dreams and actions of whoever she is focusing on in that chapter. This is a blend of history, theory and imagination (it feels wrong to call this fictional!) that tells these women's stories with them, not the researcher or the audience, at the center. This was amazing, one of the best I have read this year. A new way of thinking about history is unlocked in my brain!
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