A revolution took place in the United States after Emancipation. A great migration north of the formerly enslaved brought with it convulsive changes in the organisation of cities, the shape of communities, and the practices of everyday life. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (2019), Saidiya Hartman charts the nature of those changes, tracking African American women and queer radicals who were pathologised in their time period and reframing them as revolutionaries, the avant-garde of new ways of living in the early twentieth century. In this final episode of our pilot season, Saidiya discusses her routes into the book, how it grew from her earlier work on Atlantic slavery, and how through it she sought to find life, agency, and vibrance through the gaps, holes, and absences in the historical archive. Saidiya is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and a MacArthur Fellowship (2019). She is University Professor at Columbia University.

'I wanted to think about making and doing and the practices of everyday life that are so important not just to sustaining survival but to making another way in the context of the enclosure.'

Craft is brought to you by Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary literature. Check out our website, www.wasafiri.org, for outtakes and a full transcript of this interview, and much more from writers all over the world.

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