Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, by Saidiya Hartman

“Forgotten memories.”

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Columbia University English Professor Saidiya Hartman makes close readings of archival artifacts as windows into the black experience in northern U.S. cities between 1890-1935.  That summary may or may not sound exciting, but Hartman does something breathtaking with her pages: she writes histories of forgotten people.  She teases backstory from a black and white photograph of a little girl in a rag seller’s Harlem tenement.  She takes us out for a night with a gay chorus girl who has fallen in love and whose heart will break.  Through painstaking research, Hartman can discern the murmur of a speakeasy on 125th Street a hundred years ago like the ocean in a seashell.

Although I fancy myself a wordsmith, Hartman displays an ability to turn a phrase like I have never seen.  I had to put down the book for a week after reading the first three pages out of sheer dismay.  Her study charts a “narrative written from nowhere, from the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia.”  She celebrates “surplus women of no significance” and seeks to “exhume open rebellion from a case file.”  Hartman produces an “archive of the exorbitant” in order to document the history of “a revolution in a minor key.” While learning about “black intimate life,” we witness the “everyday choreography of the possible.”  Improvisatory living becomes “the art of reckoning with chance.”  We develop a romance for “the black ordinary.”  We admire the “the acts of the wayward,” as well as the “fugitive text of the wayward.”  In the end, we come away with “the radical hope of living otherwise.”  This, my friends, is a scholar who writes.

Of the case studies, Hartman’s treatment of a young, dandified W.E.B. Du Bois conducting a sociological survey on the root causes of civic disorder in the emerging black ghettos of Philadelphia stands out.  Hartman uses Du Bois’ eavesdropping of three women looking in a shop window who say “That’s the kind of shoes I’d buy my fellow” as a leitmotif as she pulls back Du Bois’ contradictions in layers.  We also see horror in abundance watching police-assisted race riots at the turn of the 20th-century (police brutality against black bodies has roots as far back as the antebellum period).  We get horror-story grade glimpses into conditions in women’s reformatories, as abhorrent as your worst mental image of a Victorian-era psychiatric ward.  Police could arrest young black women on charges of “vagrancy,” as they did with Billi Holiday, for example, with no more rationale than walking outside alone at night.  Reformers could prove as racist as the KKK, while believing they were doing good, which makes their abuses all the more terrible.

I will say that Hartman exemplifies what we might call “the academic style,” elements of which drive me to distraction.  Take, for instance, The List, a favorite of humanities scholars, “The bedroom was a domain of thought in deed and a site for enacting, exceeding, undoing, and remaking relations of power” [italics added].  Would the sentence suffer without four gerunds in a row?  And yes, if you’re wondering, you’ll find lists throughout.

Next, we encounter persistent Doubling.  Take, for instance, “Then comes the chorus, and the dancing bodies are arranged in beautiful lines that shift and change as the flourish and excess of the dancers unfold into riotous possibility and translate the tumult and upheaval of the Black Belt into art” [again, italics added].  How does “shift” differ from “change?”  Doesn’t “tumult” mean the same thing as “upheaval?”  In general, academics and intellectuals have trouble saying or speaking anything in the easy or singular, creating a lyrical though redundant and superfluous use of words and phrases as they write, explain, discuss, analyze, elucidate, and explore their subjects and topics.

I’d also like to see Hartman go further in her brilliant broadening of methodology.  She broaches the fascinating history of “noise riots” in the women’s wards referenced earlier.  She addresses gender performativity head-on in her exploration of Harlem drag kings.  To some degree uses movement as a metaphor as well as a profession in the final chapters.  The expansion of academic inquiry beyond everything as a “text” comes as a welcome relief and I’d love to see her push more.  She might build explicit bridges to adjacent areas of research, like sound studies (because humanities), performance studies, movement studies, and the like.

Overall, if you want to see the right way to do close readings of archival finds, Hartman shows you how it’s done.  Her publisher, W.W. Norton, falls more into the “trade publication” bucket instead of a high-impact academic imprint someone of Hartman’s stature might otherwise choose, so she wants civilians to read her work.  At the same time, you get sixty-eight pages of endnotes, so if do happen to be a cultural theorist for whom a lack of attribution would make you queasy, fear not.  As you would expect, Hartman’s research breadcrumbs are flawless.

Seeing a hard-core academic monograph (single author study, the gold standard of tenure seekers) on a middlebrow “Best-of” twenty first-century book list, surprised me.  After reading her work, I understand why.