MC Book Club: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - 2/6/2023

Conversation Overview

In celebration of Black History Month, the Messy Conversations book club series continues with Saidiya Hartman's brilliant, moving and deeply researched Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award, Hartman's work examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Selected Chapters

"The Terrible Beauty of the Slum" (p. 3-12)
"An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom" (p. 45-76)
"Mista Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman" (p. 193-204)
"The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner" (p. 229-257)

Order a copy from Malik Books and use discount code BHMConvo10 at checkout for 10% off your order!

Guest Bios

David Tripp, PhD taught at USC, CSULA, Southwest CC, and Glendale CC before teaching his first course at Antioch in the summer of 1989 and he's been here ever since. He served as chair of the BA program (1998-2002) and was the Founding Director (1999) of the Bridge Program. Always passionate about teaching and suffering from an "infinite curiosity problem," over the years he has designed over 40 courses or workshops for undergraduate students.

Asa Wilder is the Reference and Instruction Librarian at AULA. He was raised in a middle-class Jewish household in suburban Kansas City, Missouri. He is interested in how libraries, archives and museums shape historical narratives and he currently serves on the University's Antiracist Task Force.

Additional Resources

Venus in Two Acts

This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn't already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

Light and Legacies by Janaka Bowman Lewis

ISBN: 9781643363851

Publication Date: 2023-04-27

An engaging study of Black Feminism as expressed through literature written by and about Black girls In Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation, author Janaka Lewis examines Black girlhood in American literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The representation of Black girlhood in contemporary literature has long remained underexplored. Through this literary history of "Black Girl Magic," Lewis offers one of the first studies in this rapidly growing field of study. Light and Legacies poignantly showcases the activist dimensions of creative literature through work by women writers such as Toni Morrison and Toni Cade. As vectors of protest, these stories reflect historical events while also creating an enduring space of liberation and expression. The book provides didactic and reflective portrayals of the Black experience-an experience which has long been misunderstood. In a work both enlightening and personal, Lewis brilliantly weaves accounts of her own journey in conjunction with the liberating stories that shaped her and so many others.

Saidiya Hartman reimagines Black America

by Alexis Okeowo in New Yorker 1000721, (2020): 44-51

The Condemnation of Blackness — Harvard University PressWinner of the John Hope Franklin PrizeA Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year“A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of BooksHow did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Black crime statistics have shaped debates about everything from public education to policing to presidential elections, fueling racism and justifying inequality. How was this statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged? Why was the same link not made for whites? In the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump, under the shadow of Ferguson and Baltimore, no questions could be more urgent.“The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work…[It] shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a ‘statistical discourse’ about black crime…one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice.”—Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation“Muhammad identifies two different responses to crime among African-Americans in the post–Civil War years, both of which are still with us: in the South, there was vigilantism; in the North, there was an increased police presence. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements.”—New Yorker

Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation Can Help Inspire Today's ActivistsThe concept provides an artistic and powerful way to engage in social change by coaxing our imagination to connect us to the voices of the past.