This review considers how Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval poses a challenge to the reader. The invitation is to stay immersed within the everyday lives of Black women and girls, who navigated the terrains of New York City and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, without fleeting into spectacle or pathology. One may assume that such is an effortless proposition that is carried simply by the desire to think about Black women. However, Hartman tacitly demonstrates that a tremendous counter-historiography must be amassed to write the stories of those who have been underwritten by the tales of politics, great Black men, shining Black starlets, or the widely pathologized Black female figure. Thus, Wayward Lives weaves together a beautiful narrative of the social upheaval of Black women and girls at the dawning of Northern urban space, and what would later become known as the Black ghetto. At the same time, Hartman exposes the limits of the official record and narratives which relegate the lives of Black women as tertiary, as opposed to an integral political history in its own right.
Articles by Patrice D. Douglass
Patrice D. Douglass is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She received her PhD in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include black feminist theory, the legal archive of slavery, political theory, and gender theory. In 2015, Patrice served as the Research Ambassador to the Universität Bremen, Germany where she contributed to the workshop series "Internationalization at Home." Patrice is currently at work on her first book project, tentatively titled, Politicizing Gender: Sociogeny, Violence, and Narrative in Black, which interrogates the narrative assumptions of political and gender theory by reading critical works in contradistinction to Black feminist engagements with the appearances of sexual violence against the enslaved in antebellum case law. Patrice’s publications have appeared and are forthcoming in The Black Scholar, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature, and Culture, Theory and Event, Journal of Visual Culture, and Oxford Bibliographies.