Descrizione
What does it mean to desire a good life when survival itself cannot be taken for granted? How can you imagine freedom when you are forced to submit to the rules of exclusion? Two or three generations after the end of slavery, young black women discovered the city and its promises and rejected the narrow roles that society had assigned them. Before the writers, before the preachers and scholars of racial issues, black girls questioned the profound meaning of freedom and discovered that it was possible to carry out a real revolution by acting on the only dimension they could control, the intimate one. To describe the world through their eyes, Saidiya Hartman starts from the archives – police files, articles, family albums, sociologists’ reports – from which she draws the backbone of the events she recounts. Rebel Lives, Beautiful Experiments tells stories of very free love, of “single” but far from lonely mothers, of humiliating jobs rejected and of affections born inside the rooms of a women’s prison. Bringing to light what has been erased or removed, giving voice to silence: this is the extraordinary work that Hartman carries out with rigor and participation, crossing the stories of these disobedient women with those of well-known figures such as Billie Holiday, Paul Laurence Dunbar and WEB Du Bois, but always allowing “the chorus” to occupy the center of the stage.
