Hartman allows these historical voices to fluidly reverberate in the body of the narrative. These ‘ordinary’ lives offer glimpses of thrilling possibilities of how to live. In search of the ordinary, the anonymous, she turns to the archives: to police reports, photographs, and clinical notes with the aim of locating those who are otherwise lost. She gives voice to a wide-ranging chorus of women telling a story of resistance to an oppressive reality. Theorizing a possibility of a free life with a recognition of the various structural oppressions in society is a challenge brought to vivid life in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman.įor her study of the alternative paths traced by young black women in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, Hartman, a professor of English at Columbia, adopts a literary rather than an academic register. What is a free life? This seemingly simple question is, of course, anything but simple.
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