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SJCPL Online Book Group

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by Saidiya Hartman

In this lyrical and novelistic speculative history, author Saidiya Hartman reconstructs the lives of unknown black female urban rebels from the early 20th century.

In this lyrical and novelistic speculative history, author Saidiya Hartman reconstructs the lives of unknown black female urban rebels from the early 20th century.

As black women streamed into cities at the turn of the 20th century looking for better lives, they struggled to push back at a system that forced them into domestic work, sexual violence, and police brutality. Hartman wonders about and imagines her subjects’ lives between the archival lines in vivid detail. These affectionate and reverent reconstructions add up to a picture of black urban women’s courage, their attempts to carve out freedom, love, autonomy, power, and pleasure in socially constrained circumstances. Publishers Weekly writes, "This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement."

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is available to check out in regular print, e-book, and e-audiobook formats. 

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