BrooksĪ profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory. gorgeous, heartbreaking triumph of a book.-Daphne A. This is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility. They will also learn much about the social forces that enabled and constrained their struggle to live in beauty and freedom.-Cheryl A. As a result of her formidable research, stunning erudition, translucent prose and bold imagination, Saidiya Hartman reanimates their lives. A virtuosic work of scholarship that recovers fragments of the lives of women who were supposed to be forgotten. These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom.-Kat Stoeffelīrilliant.

The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy-not only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share.-Joanna Scutts

In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems. Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed.-MacArthur Foundation

Wayward lives