Saidiya Hartman
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women and queer radicals London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021

We turn to dreams. Hartman writes,

‘The album assembled here is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise. By attending to these lives, a very unexpected story of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalisation, an aesthetical and riotous history of colored girls and their experiments with freedom — a revolution before Gatsby…

The decades between 1890 and 1935 were decisive in determining the course of black futures. A revolution in a minor key unfolded in the city and young black women were the vehicle. This upheaval or transformation of black intimate life was the consequence of economic exclusion, material deprivation, racial enclosure, and social dispossession; yet it, too, was fueled by the vision of a future world and what might be.’ p. xvii.

Schedule

Unsettled Subjects met to discuss reading this book between October and December 2023

4 October from the beginning of ‘A Note on Method’ to the end of ‘An Unloved Woman’ (pp. Xv – pp. 44).

18 October from the beginning of  ‘An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom’ to the end of ‘An Atlas of the Wayward’ (pp. 45–122).

1 November from the beginning of ‘A Chronicle of Need of Want’ to the end of ‘In a Moment of Tenderness the Future Seems Possible’ (pp. 123–160).

15 November Book Two (pp. 161–216).

29 November from the beginning of ‘Revolution in a Minor Key’ to the end of ‘Riot and Refrain’ (pp. 217–286).

13 December from the beginning of ‘The Socialist Delivers a Lecture on Free Love’, to the end (pp. 287–350).

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