Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-26-2021
ISSN
2330-1295
Publisher
JOTWELL
Language
en-US
Abstract
Saidiya Hartman opens her powerful and lyrical Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval with an epigraph from Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: “She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way, a disturbing factor.” As I read Hartman’s brilliant narrative recreation of the voices, words, and intimate lives of “young black women,” at the turn of the twentieth century, as they sought “to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free” (P. xiii), another Harlem Renaissance novel came to mind: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1929). The desire to live free also preoccupies Angela Murray, the young Black woman whose own intimate history and experiments in living are at the center of Plum Bun. While Murray has more economic and family resources and class privilege than the young Black women whose lives Hartman makes palpably and poignantly real to readers, this fictional heroine and these women alike perceive the bar that “the color line” poses—at every turn— to living “as if” free. “Freedom!” is the most frequent “note” in the “melody of living” of which Angela dreams, and she perceives that “[c]olour or rather the lack of it seemed . . . the one absolute prerequisite” to that dream life and to the “difference between freedom and fetters.” (Fauset 13, 137.)
Recommended Citation
Linda C. McClain,
A Radical, Subaltern Chorus: Saidiya Hartman’s Album of Rebellious Young Black Women
,
in
JOTWELL
(2021).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3923
Comments
Review of Saidiya Hartman's, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019).