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A review by laurareads87
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Absolutely incredible -- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is absolutely one of the best books rooted in archival research that I've ever read. In recognizing "the revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives" [xv] Hartman works with the goal of learning from Black women who experimented with new ways of living and community-building and connecting that resisted the racist and patriarchal criminalization, pathologization, and violence surrounding them. The argument: that "young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise" [xv]. In working with fragments - arrest records, photos, case files - Hartman speculates on what has been lost, what these women might've been thinking and feeling, the text "marked by the errantry that it describes" [xiv]. Highly, highly recommend.
Graphic: Confinement, Racial slurs, Racism, Violence, Forced institutionalization, and Police brutality
Moderate: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Misogyny, Sexual violence, and Torture
Minor: Gun violence