There, the author argues, is the culture’s actual core, the very seedbed of American modernism: young black women yielding “a thousand new forms and improvisations” on love and liberation. Hartman opens her experimental book, explaining that she’s written from “the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia.” Hartman takes us “there,” to that elsewhere on the “margin,” that black, blurry nowhere in the wake of American history. Du Bois, and fourteen year-old Eleanor Fagan (aka Billie Holiday) appear in these pages, Hartman’s narrative focuses on round-the-way girls, “gender-queer strollers,” lesbian chorines, and working-class intellectuals like Mattie Jackson, Gladys Bentley, Esther Brown, and Mabel Hampton - women overlooked historically and otherwise invisible in official archives. While key cultural figures such as Ida B. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is about the radical sexualities and the aesthetics of waywardness that young black women introduced into early twentieth-century American life.
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