Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother, Scenes of Subjection. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.
"I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved.…[Hartman's] mode is
intimate, radical and always alive to the details."
*Leslie Jamison - The New York Times Book Review*
"Revelatory.… Wayward Lives is thrilling to read because it invents
a genre as deft and adventurous as the lives it chronicles."
*Sam Huber - The Nation*
"Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and
afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be
foreclosed."
*MacArthur Foundation*
"Kaleidoscopic.… In granting these forgotten women a voice, and
conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the
century-long diminution of their lives to social problems.… The
result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than
history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy—not only
towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers
all around us, whose humanity we share."
*Joanna Scutts - New Republic*
"Genre-bending literary history.… These are dishy, illuminating,
and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between
desire and freedom."
*Kat Stoeffel - Elle*
"Brilliant.… A virtuosic work of scholarship that recovers
fragments of the lives of women who were supposed to be forgotten.
As a result of her formidable research, stunning erudition,
translucent prose and bold imagination, Saidiya Hartman reanimates
their lives. Readers will not be able to forget them. They will
also learn much about the social forces that enabled and
constrained their struggle to live in beauty and freedom."
*Cheryl A. Wall - Cheryl A. Wall*
"A radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of ‘ordinary’
young Black women.… As is redolent of all Hartman’s work, Wayward
Lives, Beautiful Experiments offers a blistering critique of
historical archives as the singular or even most authoritative
source of credible knowledge.… [She] implores us to pause and
consider who is inside of and outside of the archive; whose voice
is heard and whose voice is silenced; whose lives matter and whose
lives do not."
*Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - Los Angeles Review of Books*
"This is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive
simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility.… [A]
gorgeous, heartbreaking triumph of a book."
*Daphne A. Brooks - New Inquiry*
"A profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our
understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory.… A
bravely wayward, unflinchingly hybrid book, perhaps best described
as halfway between the novel and documentary history, but more than
anything else it leaves me curious about where Saidiya Hartman’s
thinking will take us next."
*Jess Row - Bookforum*
"Weaving in and out of disciplinary standards for both historical
and archival works, Wayward Lives employs tools such as speculative
imaginings and possibility to elaborate on the potential thoughts,
wishes, and fears each character might have experienced. Hartman is
at her most virtuosic in these moments of supposition, where entire
pages, sections, and chapters hinge on key words like ‘perhaps,’
‘maybe,’ and ‘possible.’ She deftly points to what we can never
know about these figures while underlining what we know for sure:
that they lived, struggled, thought, and loved."
*Jehan Roberson - Public Books*
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