To critique the pathologized and criminalized depictions of these ‘wayward’ young women Hartman takes the reader from the archival opening into the tenement, the ghetto, the streets, the jail cell, the theater, the dancehall, the rented bedroom, the hallway––the places where the Black girls are found. To find these women, Hartman turns to the archive: social-work files, parole officers’ reports, psychiatrist interviews, slum photography, prison case files, and reformers’ notes, all of which become, for Hartman, traces of ‘wayward’ Black women. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers the histories of “ordinary” young Black women trying to “live as if they were free” in Philadelphia and New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
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