The UCLA Department of Gender Studies Hosts
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: A Reading With Saidiya Hartman
March 13, 2019, 4:00pm
Cornell Hall Room D313, Anderson School of Management
RSVP Required: https://waywardlivesucla.eventbrite.com
Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, will read from and discuss her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the social revolution of black intimate life in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century in a breathtaking work of history and literary imagination.
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.
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.
Sponsored by the Department of Gender Studies with generous co-sposorships from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions, the Departments of African American Studies and English, and the Center for the Study of Women.
