Experimenting within and across literature, sociology, and art criticism, Hartman stretches the intelligible boundaries of social history to encompass the conceptual expansion of the plantation as a zone of racial enclosure to the city center, while illuminating the city’s more obscure settings - the cabarets, speakeasies, and theaters, where extravagant and exorbitant female performers mingled with a Black female working class. Wayward Lives is divided into books, each of which serves as a unique compendium, or minor anthology, that demonstrates how Black women’s labor, artistic experiments, and performative practices, constituted strategies of survival that clashed with the violent policing of Black lives, state-sanctioned segregation, city-wide austerity measures, and the systematic discrimination and inequality that led to the impoverishment of Black urban populations.
At the same time, the concealed and hidden histories of eccentric, queer, and gender nonconforming figures hover at the edges of the photographs, letters, archival documents, and other ephemera that Hartman has included, revealing the centrality of these minor figures, not simply to the stories we ought to tell about Black historical subjectivity, but about American modernity. The singular discursive aims of the text center on Hartman’s commitment to highlighting the creativity, beauty, and possibility of Black women, whose sexuality, aesthetic ambitions, and imaginations consistently made them a target of restrictive Progressive Era reforms directed at the urban poor. SAIDIYA HARTMAN’S Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval is an elegant study in the arts of refusal cultivated by young Black women at the turn of the 20th century.
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