Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
Revolution in a minor key: how young Black women invented freedom.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.
These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood — all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2020
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Publishing has a diversity problem. There are less 'diverse' books being published which limits the discoverability and reach of those authors.
Representation is important. Read more about why we exist here.
An anti-racist social enterprise bookstore specialising in BIPOC books.
Only about 11% of books published are by BIPOC authors — so unless you specifically seek out books by BIPOC authors, you aren't likely to find very many of them organically. At Amplify, BIPOC authors are highlighted and celebrated. Here, they don't have to fight to be seen, and you don't have to fight to find them.
We hope that in our shop, you can discover a new favourite read, find stories that speak uniquely to you, learn about a culture outside your own (or more about your own histories), and gain a better understanding of the systems that connect us all.
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