Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

by Saidiya Hartman

informed by a different set of values and recognizes the revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives.

The wild idea that animates this book is 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.

In 1838, Negroes were disenfranchised after the state legislature decided that black and white citizens were not equal in the eyes of the law and changed the qualifications for suffrage in the state constitution from every freeman to every white freeman twenty-one and over who had paid taxes.

In the 835 hours of conversation with five thousand people in the ward, they asked, Why are you studying us? Wouldn’t it be better to study white folks, since they are the ones who need changing?

workers. Those lonely years at Harvard had taught him how avidly the liberal north policed the race lines.

wholeheartedly indulgence and idleness as the real luxury good. What did untested

the most densely populated in the city and