Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments contains some of the most imaginative, inventive, and radical history writing I’ve ever encountered. Taking as her subjects the black women excluded from the US historical archive, Hartman challenges and unsettles dominant understandings of who “makes” history. In vibrant and ecstatic prose, Hartman tells the story of how the wayward, the queer, the fugitive, the poor, and the dispossessed imagined and practiced care, love, and freedom in the face of the violence of racial capitalism and white supremacy. My favorite book of 2019.
–Sam W., Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
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