wayward lives beautiful experiments review

(2020) Review: Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840–1917, by Dale Cockrell, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheavals, by Saidiya Hartman. Johnson (2014) A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. ‘I Like It ’Cause I Love It’ (1944) Soundie. (2013) ‘Delilah Jackson, a New Yorker who chronicled the history of black entertainers in the mid-20th century, dies at age 84’. Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine 46/1 (Fall): 23–44. (2019) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls. Grantham (2021) ‘Showstoppers! Putting Chorines Back under the Spotlight’. (2022) ‘Chorine Research’.įeldman, C., and H. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.įeldman, C. In Montreal: The History of a North American City, edited by Dany Fougères and Roderick Macleod, 37–73.

(2017) ‘The Second World War: Wartime Production and War Efforts’. (2019) Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840–1917. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Ĭockrell, D. (2008) Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Employing Hartman’s own call-and-response technique of rhetorical questions which spotlight the uncertain answers to questions about minoritized human experience, I ask: ‘How did the “light-skinned chorines” in multi-racial 1930s nightclub and theater culture create spaces of “beautiful experiment” within their day-to-day? How did the “noisy” dance of jazz reinscribe-or subtly subvert-the white racist gaze? What did the chorines think about all this?’ This creative non-fiction essay imagines responses.Ĭhristopher J Smith, Texas Tech Universityīrown, J. Saidiya Hartman’s 2021 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments literally re-imagines the experience of young black women in 1910s New York, employing a method Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, in which-rather in the form of retconned speculative fiction-she teases out gaps in the archival record.

Music, dance, African American culture, jazz, USA Abstract

Wayward lives beautiful experiments review