• The Beauty of History
• Grace Elizabeth Hale (bio)

Like anyone familiar with Saidiya Hartman's work, I expected theory and history and rigor when I sat down to read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I expected brilliance. What I did not expect was so much beauty: beautiful characters, beautiful prose, and beauty as an idea and a practice of mattering.

Hartman takes on the task of resurrecting people mostly left out of the chronicles of past value we call history, working-class Black girls on the cusp of adulthood and the young women they become, trying to make free lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Called wayward girls and surplus women by their critics in New York City and Philadelphia, the cities that are Hartman's focus, these rebels use everything they have, their looks and their gestures, their bodies and their minds, to escape the practices created to contain them in lives of servility and drudgery. In defiance of law and reason and what passes for common sense, they insist on their right to pleasure and to beauty. Often, individually, they lose. But collectively, they create new ways of imagining gender and sex and freedom and desire, characteristics that will come to define the modern world.

Like other scholars before her, Hartman confronts the limits of the archives, the way her subjects mostly appear in historical documents created by an army of reformers, social workers, law enforcement officials, journalists, scholars, and doctors who understood Black girls and women as a problem. She reads the traces of her subjects that appear in surviving notebooks, case files, reports, surveys, and photographs "against the grain" to try tease out their lives. And she acknowledges that this by now well-established mode of analysis cannot fully counter the absence at the heart of the archive and the way the documents often perpetuate the erasure of Black girls and Black women's full humanity. Not content to rest with a state that perpetuates the original violence against her subjects, she does something bold and radical and rather unprecedented. She employs theory and empathy "to speculate, listen intently, read between the lines, attend to the disorder and mess of the archive." Rather than simply "breaking open" historical accounts and exposing their limits, she "narrates" the missing stories. Deeply informed by her own and others' research, she imagines the interior lives of her subjects, their mostly unrecorded feelings and pleasures. She conjures their dreams.

To recover her subjects' real histories, their lives as human beings rather than as problems, Hartman creates her own beautiful experiment.

She leaves history as most scholars understand it behind and creates an assemblage that uses historic documents as a foundation for the informed speculation she calls "critical fabulation," "a dream book for existing otherwise" in which young Black women are "social visionaries and innovators." In the process, she expands our sense of what has been and is possible and illuminates the connections between words and world-making.

At the center of Hartman's text is a chorus. This chorus is theatrical, a group of unnamed Black girls and women who comment on the action produced by the assorted do-gooders and law enforcement officials who attempt to understand, control, and "reform" them. This chorus is also a musical structure, the part that repeats after the verses offer up specific lives. The message of this refrain is simple: categories invented by others who "could only ever recognize her as a problem" do not tell us much about the intimate histories of Black girls. Hartman's chorus is also a collective voice, the author and her characters singing the blues, pleasures and sorrows and desires, meanings made of melody and rhythm and mood.

Both this chorus and Hartman's named characters convey what she calls "the beauty of the black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise." "Beauty is not a luxury," Hartman insists...

• 历史之美
• 格蕾丝·伊丽莎白·黑尔（生物）

就像熟悉赛义迪雅·哈特曼（Saidiya Hartman）的任何人一样，当我坐下来阅读《任性的生活，美丽的实验》时，我期望理论，历史和严谨性。我期待着光彩。我没想到有那么多美丽：美丽的角色，美丽的散文和美丽作为一种想法和一种重要的实践。

哈特曼（Hartman）的任务是复活大多数被人们遗忘的过去价值编年史（我们称之为历史），工薪阶层的黑人女孩以及成年后的年轻女性，他们试图在20世纪初实现自由生活。这些叛乱分子被纽约市和费城（哈特曼关注的城市）的评论家称为任性的女孩和过剩的妇女，他们利用自己拥有的一切，外貌和手势，身体和思想逃避为遏制她们而产生的习俗生活在奴役和繁重的生活中。他们无视法律和理性以及常识所遵循的原则，坚持享有享乐和享有美的权利。通常情况下，他们会输掉比赛。但总的来说，他们创造了新的方式来想象性别，性，自由和欲望，

与之前的其他学者一样，哈特曼也面临着档案的局限，她的主题大多出现在由改革家，社会工作者，执法人员，新闻工作者，学者和医生组成的历史文件中，这些人将黑人女孩和妇女理解为一个问题。她阅读幸存的笔记本，病历档案，报告，调查和“反对谷物”的照片中出现的主题痕迹，以试图弄清他们的生活。她承认，到目前为止，这种行之有效的分析模式还不能完全抵消档案馆中心位置的缺失以及文件经常使消灭黑人女孩和黑人妇女的人性永久化的方式。不满足于维持对她的臣民的原始暴力的状态，她做了一些大胆而激进的事情，这是史无前例的。她运用理论和同理心“推测，专心地听，在线条之间阅读，注意档案的混乱和混乱”。她“叙述”缺失的故事，而不是简单地“打破”历史记录并揭露其局限性。她从自己和他人的研究中获得了深刻的信息，她想象着被摄对象的内部生活，以及他们大部分未被记录的感受和愉悦。她让人想起他们的梦想。她从自己和他人的研究中获得了深刻的信息，她想象着被摄对象的内部生活，以及他们大部分未被记录的感受和愉悦。她让人想起他们的梦想。她从自己和他人的研究中获得了深刻的信息，她想象着被摄对象的内部生活，以及他们大部分未被记录的感受和愉悦。她让人想起他们的梦想。

为了恢复对象的真实历史，恢复他们作为人类而不是问题的生活，哈特曼创建了自己的美丽实验。

她抛弃了大多数学者所理解的历史，并创建了一个以历史文献为基础的集会，以此作为知情的猜测的基础，她称之为“批判性捏造”，“否则将存在的梦想书”，其中年轻的黑人妇女是“社会有远见者和创新者” 。” 在此过程中，她扩大了我们对过去和可能发生的事情的认识，并阐明了文字与世界创造之间的联系。

在哈特曼著作的中心是一个合唱团。这个合唱团是戏剧性的，一群不愿透露姓名的黑人女孩和妇女，他们对各种各样的善良品和执法官员所采取的行动发表评论，他们试图理解，控制和“改造”她们。这首合唱也是一种音乐结构，在诗歌提供特定的生活之后重复出现。这种克制的信息很简单：“只能将她视为一个问题”的其他人发明的类别并没有告诉我们太多黑人女孩的亲密历史。哈特曼的合唱也是一种集体的声音，作者和她的角色在歌唱布鲁斯，享乐，悲伤和欲望，由旋律，节奏和情绪构成的意义上。

这个合唱团和哈特曼的命名人物都传达了她所说的“黑人普通人的美丽，所居住的美丽并赋予了自由生活的决心以动画，否则就推动了生活实验的美丽”。“美不是奢侈品，”哈特曼坚称...