Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, by Saidiya Hartman

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Notes

¹ Hartman cites Tina Campt's recent book Listening to Images (Duke, 2017) as an influence on how she reads photographs of black women and girls, and of tenement houses in her archive. See Wayward Lives, 356–57.

² Hartman’s writing is deeply influenced by black women historian’s work on black women in Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance, including Thavolia Glymph, Cheryl Hicks, Hazel Carby, Nell Painter, Tera Hunter, and others.

³ In her latest work, writer and social justice facilitator adrienne maree brown defines pleasure activism as “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (Pleasure Activism, 13). brown roots her concept of pleasure activism in the legacies of black lesbian feminists Audre Lorde and members of the Combahee River Collective, as well as contemporary social justice practitioners who work to re-center the body and sensation – especially sensations of pleasure – in radical political spaces using a black feminist lens.