Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (review)

Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval potently transcends the limitations of the archive to recall and re-narrate the everyday practices that young black women innovated and embodied at the turn of the twentieth century to refuse impositions on their autonomy and freedom. This lush, imaginative social history sharpens particular focus on the ways that, in the decades following the de jure end of slavery and the collapse of Reconstruction, a rebellious cast of characters hailing from the ghettos of Philadelphia and New York City began rehearsing and enacting alternative existences in defiance of the unrelenting conditions of anti-blackness. Hartman draws her unruly protagonists from an array of records that, even while offering few if any details about the young women that appear in them, betray a commitment to marking the circumstances and events of their lives as pathological and criminal. She rejoins the various misrecognitions she encountered in the archive by fashioning a layered narrative that ponders its subjects as "radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise" (xv). The book is a masterful act of recuperation and speculation that meticulously renders and reveals black women and girls as significant agents of social transformation.

The methodological framework Hartman employs is surely among the book's most remarkable and rewarding attributes. A note included at the beginning of the text outlines some of the specific practices the scholar relied upon to refigure "archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed black social life in the twentieth century" (xiv). "I employ a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text," Hartman writes (xiii–xiv). A notable effect of this decidedly performative style is the synthesis of method and content that it engenders. Perhaps as important are the ways it enables Hartman to exploit slippages between the indicative and the subjunctive.

Hartman organizes the volume's twenty chapters into three books. In the first, "She Makes an Errant Path through the City," she situates the ghetto as a site of radical possibility "where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them" (4). She also details how her search to find photographic evidence of what living a meaningful, free life involved for black women and girls in the wake of slavery led her to follow in their footsteps and recreate aspects of their often-peripatetic journeys. For the characters who animate the book, lingering on or strolling down the street might mean catching the attention of a black luminary like Paul Laurence Dunbar or W.E.B. Du Bois, who would wonder in writing what the waywardness they witnessed perhaps foretold about "the future after slavery" (85). More often than not, however, it meant evading the law or thwarting the lascivious advances of those who imagined all black women and girls as sexually available. Hartman suggests that despite the hyper-surveillance and regulation that their very presences often induced, young black women continued to pursue freedom dreams, seek out tenderness, and "believe that another kind of life was within reach" (139).

The chapters in the second book, "The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt," consider the different kinds of intimate arrangements young black women began establishing to stake a claim for the abundance of their desires. A highlight of this section is a chapter titled, "Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s," which centers on the endlessly fascinating entertainer Gladys Bentley. While much has been written about Bentley by performance and cultural studies scholars in recent years, Hartman offers a completely fresh take, reimagining scenes from the artist's...