A review by kxiong5
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman

5.0

What a book! The histories it's reconstructing (yes, reconstructing, remaking -- the methodological innovation just runs through and transforms the prose itself, which is just SO COOL) through these fragments of history (reconstructing the history of those who have to hide their trails, for whom being seen is through arrest records, subject: prisoner, criminal, prostitute, non-human, must have been such painstaking work) and then using present theory and concepts of self to fill out the selves that have been denied by those material traces -- and then also recognizing that that filling out of those selves isn't an attempt to 'pin down' people or speak for them, but to give them voice, to give them potential, to point out the way they smirk back at the camera and elude capture through questions -- to say, these people are *worth* asking about, but whether or not they'll answer will always be up to them -- all of this is to say, this book flits in and out of personal and political and the political intrusions into the personal, and it doesn't stop at the academic voices or the places where theory applies, and it doesn't treat the academic as if they're somehow at a remove from the whole situation, and I could write pages and pages (I have pages and pages of Overdrive annotations that I can't export bc I read this on a browser), and I'd venture to say this is a new *form* of speculative history that is itself a beautiful experiment. In any case, it's something to wonder about and return to, again and again and again.