Saidiya Hartman

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question "What is a free life?", many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires. "Ambitious, original . . . a beautiful experiment in its own right." -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, Hartman reckons with the blank sl

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother

Allison Newman

Francisco

Venus in Two Acts

Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism "Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history." —Parul Sehgal, New York Times Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Cristina Rivera Garza

Joseph M. Pierce

Phoebe Boswell

Janaína Oliveira

The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together five artists, thinkers, and writers who proposed new ways of being and discussed radical visions for the future. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World captures and expands these lectures to illuminate our path towards this possible beautiful world. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) asserts that “for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Film curator Janaína Oliveira (Brazil) evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality. Visual artist Phoebe Boswell (UK/Kenya) asks, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next?” Saidiya Hartman (US) prompts us to consider our capacity to burn, examining whether “the gift of pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” Cristina Rivera Garza (US/Mexico) gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, “the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each alchemist is intimately concerned with this cargo, our ability to bear its weight, and how we might find the beautiful world together.

The Alchemy Lecture

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World

Craig Calhoun

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Siddharth Dube

Michael Herzfeld

Walter D. Mignolo

Jean Comaroff

Ajay Skaria

Sandra Greene

Milind Wakankar

A special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly

Enduring Enchantments

Fred Moten

Hortense J. Spillers

Sylvia Wynter

Denise Ferreira da SIlva

A antologia de ensaios Pensamento Negro Radical, com apresentação de María Elvira Diaz-Benítez, conta com as primeiras traduções para o português de trabalhos publicados entre 1987 e 2018. A "gramática estadunidense" de Hortense J. Spillers abre o volume, organizado cronologicamente, e suas proposições a respeito da carne feminina desgenerificada influenciam todos os outros textos da coletânea; Sylvia Wynter rememora o caso Rodney King em sua carta a colegas da Universidade; Saidiya Hartman revisita a história de duas garotas que morreram a bordo do Recovery para tratar da violência e limites impostos pelo arquivo; Fred Moten recorre a Hortense J. Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Nathaniel MacKey e John Coltrane (passando por Sócrates, Jacques Derrida, Charlie "Bird" Parker) em seu ensaio sobre pretitude (e o nada); Denise Ferreira da Silva, no texto que fecha o livro, propõe o que chama de experimento radical negro e oferece operações para hackear o Sujeito, performando sua recusa.

Pensamento negro radical

Saidiya Hartman

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