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A review by sam_bizar_wilcox
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
5.0
Saidiya Hartman draws attention to archival gaps, to the figures in history standing in the margins of the camera's gaze. The intellectual project of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is one that is terrifically unlike any other work of criticism I'd encountered before. It's an intellectual project that offers the reintroduction of art to the academy, leveraging the argumentative power of narration in a non-fiction text. Hartman writes as an explosion of potentiality, opening history as a source of possibility and rich experience, her subjects becoming the protagonists of the novels that might have been.
To read this book is to rejoice. It is a book that exhumes from the forgotten memories of the past the lives of brilliant individuals, re-storied here in a form of triumph. Fin de siècle New York and Philadelphia here are rendered with such detail and color, one feels as if history and present are intrinsically entwined. And indeed, with the contemporary resonances of police brutality, systemic racism, and deep-rooted income inequality, the past reads as present, horrific and gorgeous as all that implies.
The central project of Hartman's book seems to be not just interrogating who writes history, but how writes history. What becomes a text from literary studies becomes a historiography, showing how reconciling with narratives, and the loss of narratives, transcends disciplinary boundaries. And yet, as the text consistently directs attention to what lingers beyond the page, what is left out of the text, the book too carves space for imaginative resistance and imaginative movement within the academy. Potentiality not just as practice, but potentiality as expressed for itself, in itself.
To read this book is to rejoice. It is a book that exhumes from the forgotten memories of the past the lives of brilliant individuals, re-storied here in a form of triumph. Fin de siècle New York and Philadelphia here are rendered with such detail and color, one feels as if history and present are intrinsically entwined. And indeed, with the contemporary resonances of police brutality, systemic racism, and deep-rooted income inequality, the past reads as present, horrific and gorgeous as all that implies.
The central project of Hartman's book seems to be not just interrogating who writes history, but how writes history. What becomes a text from literary studies becomes a historiography, showing how reconciling with narratives, and the loss of narratives, transcends disciplinary boundaries. And yet, as the text consistently directs attention to what lingers beyond the page, what is left out of the text, the book too carves space for imaginative resistance and imaginative movement within the academy. Potentiality not just as practice, but potentiality as expressed for itself, in itself.