Bilphena Yahwon

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Savannah Wood

Bilphena Yahwon and SAVANNAH WOOD were collaborators IN OUR 2021 DIALOGUES: LEGACY AND STORYTELLING SERIES

Recommendation: WAYWARD LIVES: BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS BY SAIDIYA HARTMAN

“Hartman coins the term critical fabulation in this text which provided me with the most liberatory kind of language. she defines critical fabulation as a methodology of writing that combines archival research with fictional narrative. critical fabulation is able to fill in the gaps of all that is missing in the archives on black people as a direct result of slavery.”

- Bilphena Yahwon

“Easily one of the most important books I've read in the past two years. Hartman gives language to that feeling of knowing that so much is missing in the documented record, and offers permission for us to consider and fill in those gaps.”

- Savannah Wood

Book Description: A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.

In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.