Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval is a 2019 nonfiction book by Saidiya Hartman. Hartman is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she specializes in African American and American literature. Wayward Lives is situated at the turn of the 20th century in northern US cities during the Great Migration. It explores the lives of young Black women who migrated North for better lives with greater possibility. Hartman examines free love and Black intimacy as ordinary acts of radical freedom.

This study guide refers to the 2019 W. W. Norton & Company edition. Please note that the contents reference sexual assault.

Plot Summary

Each chapter is discrete, zooming in on a different aspect of Black life in northern cities at the turn of the 20th century. Chapter 1 begins in 1900 in Philadelphia, where ethnic minorities live among each other in a slum. Reformers take photographs of ordinary things, but there is more to the slum than they can see. The poor Black people in the area are perceived as criminal and morally degenerate, but they are exercising new ways of being free.

Chapter 2 examines a nude photograph of an anonymous Black girl taken by Thomas Eakins in 1882.