Inside this treacherous climate, they “try to make a way out of no way”. Wayward Lives is populated by a fleeting cast of Black women whose lives are scripted into servility and confinement. This review focuses on some of the ways that Hartman uses visuality and selected imagery to drive the narrative and plot in the book. She illuminates the perspectives of Black women through a vividly cinematic narrative from where we are positioned to view the world through their eyes.

In contrast to her previous work, in Wayward Lives, Hartman focuses specifically on the experiences of young Black women. “Critical fabulation” and “Black fungibility” are a few notable concepts from Hartman’s inventory of travelling ideas that have a home in all areas of Black study. All three of her books share this common thread. The bestowal of this award comes with little surprise, considering the contribution that Hartman’s work has layered into our ongoing understanding of the “afterlife of racial slavery”. It was during the spring of 2019, while in Durban, planning the upcoming Black Studies Mobile Academy with Tina Campt and Mabel Wilson (her colleagues in the Sojourner Project), that Hartman received the news that she had been honoured with the MacArthur genius grant. Wayward Lives is Hartman’s third book following her historiographical memoir, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Route (2006), and her debut, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). This is the period between the 18 a time that marks the beginning of what Hartman describes as the anarchy of young Black women who experiment with freedom, in the wake of “new forms of servitude awaiting them”. The book unfolds after the legal end of racial enslavement, at the dawn of 20th century in the United States. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (WW Norton & Company)

Wayward lives hartman