Based off archival documents, such as social. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York. In her latest book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, professor and 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Saidiya Hartman, explores the untold stories of young Black women who migrated to New York and Philadelphia from the southern United States shortly after emancipation. Combining historical analysis and literary imagination, Hartman recovers radical aspirations and resurgent desires. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2019, 441pp., ISBN: 978-7-3, US28. Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection.She a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman narrates the story of this radical transformation of black intimate and social life, crediting young black women with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Hartman’s book explores the ways young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability, and outside the bounds of law.

A social revolution unfolded in the city. 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. Her genius is no secret she was just named a MacArthur Prize winner last fall.

In the early twentieth century, young black women were in open rebellion. Hartman is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Saidiya Hartman’s highly anticipated new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (Norton, February 2019) wrestles with the question, “What is a free life?”

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