As “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” endure as features of the black ordinary, widespread disillusionment with neoliberal statecraft has empowered white supremacist regimes across the West.1 Though its merits remain contested by many, Afro-pessimism—a theoretical and increasingly interdisciplinary conceptual intervention—indicts humanist scholars’ failure to account for the brutal imaginations that persist into the twenty-first century.2 This assertion of scholars David Marriott, Jared Sexton, Frank B. Wilderson III, and others—that social death is a defining, ontological characteristic of the black—builds on the interventions of Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, and Hortense Spillers, among others. Younger scholars such as Patrice Douglass and John Murillo III, whose intellectual trajectories have been radically influenced by the proposition that black social death is the metaphysical guarantor of modernity and the subject writ large, have emerged as preeminent innovators in black studies. While Afro-pessimism’s detractors are admittedly diverse in their disagreement, from cultural workers and political economists dismayed by the analytic decentralization of identity and labor to humanists spooked by the suggestion of an irresolvable antagonism, none can deny that what began as a “highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy,” per Jared Sexton, continues to problematize assumptions that have bolstered studies of political economics, philosophy, and race since the eighteenth century.3One voice among the growing chorus of activists, artists, organizers, and scholars throughout the black diaspora who insist that modernity depends on the prohibition of black self-possession, unsettling liberal fictions of progress and conservative nostalgia for the past alike, belongs to Christina Sharpe. In her 2016 work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe suggests that black scholars of slavery and its afterlife are expected “to discard, discount, disregard, jettison, abandon, and measure” ways of knowing the world born “from and of the everyday” to produce work that is decidedly expository and legible, no matter what epistemic antiblackness this enacts.4 If one is to journey through the archives of slavery, to actively “sit in the room with history”5 without reproducing the terms of engagement that prohibit black freedom at all costs, she suggests: “We must become undisciplined.”6 The primary aim of the demand Sharpe notes—to forfeit the intimate, psychic, and social worlds of black people in approaching any study of the world—is not legible scholarship or progressive narratives of history, though these are certainly consequences. The most severe effect of this forfeiture is the incapacitation of the black imagination as it disrupts and provokes across time and space, discipline and practice. While forging new methods of researching, witnessing, and writing that understand black death to be “a predictable and constitutive aspect”7 of the United States and take for granted blackness as “the ground of terror’s possibility globally”8 will not resurrect the dead, raze prisons, or alone destroy our “cognitive schema”9 of captivity, the need to cultivate another world, one where suffering and proximity to death are not the (constitutively) sole promises of black life, is as critical as ever. A central question that scholars of black studies like Sharpe find themselves asking is, What constitutes a pedagogy and practice of bearing the baring of black life and death?The most recent evincement of this undisciplined rigor is Saidiya Hartman’s third monograph, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. Hartman’s first opus on black life in the twentieth century, Wayward Lives presents a revelatory history of young black women’s attempts to construct and sustain intimate lives in New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The text is unprecedented in its attention to the intimate post-Reconstruction worlds young black women created for themselves amid the influx of black people to northern US cities. Hartman argues that these women, in open rebellion against the reconfigured and respectable regime of antiblack terror that characterized the North, yearned to live a life unconstrained by the enduring threat of violence. Hartman shows how black women’s fashioning of something like a free life underneath and against the expanding carceral state at the turn of the century cannot be reduced to pitiful resignation, acquiescent daydreaming, sanguine scheming, or outright rebellion. Their responses to the yoke that marked this historical era of black life—a newfound responsibility for their bodies and reconfigured yet familiar brutality—were new forms of kinship and sociality that satiated their longing and kept alive their desires for a world in excess of the one they had survived.Black women courted dapper hustlers and shapely dancers, raised children alone, retained permanent partners and transient lovers, and lived with friends, admirers, and spendy sponsors. They straddled the corner and one another. They fucked for pleasure, made love for money, and refused to placate the monied and moralist reformers who shamed them to hell for it. The insubordinate envisioning and fleeting actualization of this impossible living is the subject of Hartman’s inventive narration. The text is presented in three parts: book 1, “She Makes an Errant Path through the City”; book 2, “The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt”; and book 3, “Beautiful Experiments.” Each book is subdivided into sections (four in book 2, eight in books 1 and 3) ranging from dialogical imaginings of queer intimacy and sociological extraction in Philadelphia tenements to prosaic demonstrations of antiblackness’s atemporal and material force on the lives of black women in Harlem.“After the slave ship and the plantation, the third revolution of black intimate life unfolded in the city” (wl, 61). Historians have failed to properly recognize the young black women who lived in this era as “sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists” or to “realize that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl.” Wayward Lives charts new ground in black studies and studies of twentieth-century US history by illuminating how “the revolutionary ideals that animated [the] ordinary lives” of black women permeated black urban life at the turn of the century (wl, xv). The putrid alley, the stifling tenement hallway, the simple and tidy bedroom, the lush and electric Savoy Ballroom: each geography was a laboratory for their experiments in living as if they were free. Hartman asserts that black women’s refusal to accept asterisked motherhood, civic disenfranchisement, domestic servitude, social scandalization, and the quotidian violence that sustained these projects was part of a larger social transformation that fueled white panic over the incursion of free blacks fleeing the South. These women did not arrive contagious or bloodthirsty; they were desperate to grasp hold of their bodies “emptied of self-interpretation,”10 not to redress slavery’s violence but to address the desires slavery sought to obliterate. Theirs, Hartman writes, “was a struggle without formal declarations of policy, slogan, or credo,” simply “to wander through the streets of Harlem, to want better than what she had, and to be propelled by her whims and desires was to be ungovernable” (wl, 230). While the text is primarily concerned with how intimate desire and the longing-to-be compelled these women to create unorthodox assemblages and lead renegade lives, this third revolution it presents is homonymous: revolution, the forcible overthrow of a government or social order; revolution, the movement of an object in a circular course. Black women arrived to the docks and depots of the North tender and eager to choose a lover and wild and afraid of touch. They arrived stately, demoralized, sober, smiling, alone, crying, pregnant, and patient, with few possessions and fewer plans. They arrived as ungeographic embodiments of “ontological terror.”11 Metaphysically promiscuous. Wayward and ready. “The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released to nothing at all,” Hartman writes. “They didn’t yet know that the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh” (wl, 143).The text’s attention to the lifeworlds black women created for themselves—worlds whose archival traces are generally limited and varyingly contorted, obscured, sublimated, or altogether erased—has been described by Hartman as a “labor of regard.”12 “I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible” (wl, xv). The regard at the heart of this imaginative project is clear from the beginning, as the text opens with a note on method and subsequent “cast of characters,” mostly black women. The names of Mattie Jackson, “a fifteen-year-old newly arrived in New York from Hampton, Virginia,” and Mabel Hampton, “chorine, lesbian, working-class intellectual, and aspiring concert singer,” are recorded alongside those of Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and white reformers Mary White Ovington and Helen Parrish (wl, xviii, xxi). Substantial archival research gives way to a discerning third-person limited narration, while Hartman’s cross-textual citation and curation of diary entries and found correspondence produces startlingly authentic and coherent voices, each one its own chorus fat with knowledge wrought by generations of black women artists, historians, organizers, and theoreticians.13“In the slum, everything is in short supply except sensation,” begins the first book, a sweeping survey of black women’s intimate lives and political imagining in New York and Philadelphia during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This sensorial excess or felt surplus cannot be captured by the journalists that roam the alleyways hoping to steal a glimpse of the dark ghetto. Hartman critiques white reformists’ scopophilic representations of the black urban poor at the turn of the century. The neighborhoods young black women inhabited were imaged as barren waste worlds of concrete and excrement, clotheslines and crowded rooms. “These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation” (wl, 21). Another image: a young black girl, no older than six or seven, nude on the couch of realist painter Thomas Eakins. “To do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive,”14 Hartman reprints the exposed body of the child, annotating over it. “It was not the kind of image I was looking for when I set out to tell the story of the social revolution and transformation of intimate life that unfolded in the black-city-within-the-city” (wl, 17). Rather than pivot away from the terrible meaning of this find, the text keeps vigil with the unnamed girl before the page is turned, the terror in her face a historic artifact, her future a mystery. “Her body was already marked by a history of sexual defilement, already branded as a commodity” (wl, 29).This experiment in “black annotation” begins Hartman’s reimagining.15 The availability of black girls and women to be abused, manipulated, and violated—and the violence that secured it—was not a geographic phenomenon. Intimate life in the black city was not an escape from the terror of the South but a competing vision, an experiment in the unceasing activity of fleeing that which follows you.16 W. E. B. Du Bois makes an appearance, arriving in 1896 to diagnose the body of black urbanity and ease the social malaise arising in Philadelphia before the Seventh Ward became a den of suffering. At the time of his famed research, the Negro quarter “was not yet a zone of racial enclosure characterized by extreme deprivation and regular violence. It was not yet a reserve for the dispossessed and those regulated as fungible, disposable, surplus, and not quite human. The ghetto was not yet a foregone conclusion” (wl, 94). This does not prevent Du Bois from writing off the social rearrangements black women commenced as erroneous depravity attributable to slavery. The pleasure that preempted the next disaster was palpable: a pair of young friends giddily window shopping whom Du Bois eyed on his walk home, a raucous card game tempered by the latest gossip and last night’s hangover. Du Bois’s brief but rich appearance in the first book finds him canvassing and coming up against black women distrustful of his tailored threads and nosy questions. He encounters a woman who asks: “Are we animals to be dissected by an unknown Negro at that?” He records her snub: “unwilling to respond” (wl, 100). The refusal Du Bois discovers in Philadelphia disappoints him, but the real-time reimagining of intimate life—unmarried lovers, breadwinning wives—terrifies him. “Looking at the trail of exhausted women plodding their way home, he feared for the future. The world had released these women to an awful fate. He trembled at the sight of them” (wl, 98).Equally incapable of registering the reckless appetite for another world that propelled black women through the cityscape alive and intent on living was wealthy Quaker reformer Helen Parrish, founder of Philadelphia’s Octavia Hill Association. Parrish struggled to wrangle the young women residing in the housing she had purchased to rent to black people. Hartman brings Parrish (and her antagonistic residents) to life on the page as they unrepentantly maintain numerous lovers and belligerently dismiss her appeals to collect rent. “I what the book “a woman who to Parrish by to be was one but how a black woman be Their refusal to be by one or and heart and the from it. was the with did not what was and in their as if they live or it. insist that no can if a is or no can the matter of (wl, Though white people on black to the and Hartman black women to up (wl, What was when one a that be into the excess of their an vision of what they were the book Hartman how black women living in the of slavery a of sexual violence the of their the life in the The book begins with the love story of and from and has her in Philadelphia and arrived in New York with a by way of “It was their in New so she didn’t yet know what the city it have to something better than or or or the but at a price more (wl, While she for a a white her matter where were was white had to tell to his off were in about the life in the these as if to the they did (wl, the and him to death, is to that the is a them “Her was through the city and up his was the that he had the to them from a white (wl, on the all people in the city have his face for Black are out of and in the Black women are out of their and “The did more than the (wl, out in the one of those with their is with and she in the he to the of Negro to be on (wl, throughout the text shows how the of alone the black and the of black women (wl, they to or the famed and love with the the in Hartman’s by the of an Hartman’s of these experiments the a the struggle to another In the of black women’s intimate lives by Hartman, the were one the of their revolutionary imagination or to the of and impossible While their was an in a so escape an for black women (wl, I the Black to as two generations from the to This be with the of black who the and social of sexual and failed to the of were as and and and and and were the terms to and these of intimacy and (wl, The of New Wayward and work as these lovers, a of a in a failure of an excess of were not in and of but of will and future (wl, to young women the of and were to the of the as to to or the to the or (wl, black girls these of three while women of were to a few at the (wl, On being in a the about her to a as to at the of the New York for in where of the text’s book with the of by hoping to by the housing of the the was to a as any woman who in a of or of any in a tenement or who or her for the of or who any or to a of or a room in a tenement for the of in In the to an was an a to have at all a In “Beautiful Hartman how black women and “the of the that like sought to (wl, of and correspondence a imagining of the that the women of in about the and they its The New York window of the was crowded with Negro women who were and in and on the and set They and and those this and and slavery time was They were of being and they to be (wl, Though this was not it was in that of it the her in Hartman are the of to be by those and about those who live in such an intimate with A to “the practice of to live when were to (wl, Wayward Lives is an imaginative in and The post-Reconstruction and the at generations of black women their bodies in an to live as Sharpe writes, the and of and in the black practice of possibility at a time when all except the created by are the project of at the of life and (wl, Though the text the ways that with it shows how any of black women’s and was on terror (wl, for the to this violence the and is no of Wayward Hartman’s a as if up in the of the for and to on the of black I find this of the where an that is to the text’s and to be the of the Lives is a history from the hold of the ship so that we do not the in the of black women’s to be all they for an of the wayward or an of black women who refused to up in kind will be as the text the of the and the historical of black women, what Jared as a that does not after the which is but it than from this or where is disaster and a of or black to the we The and that from the window Hartman open as a and provokes “a will to and that is so it so it makes with (wl, a of illuminating this prohibition on black freedom Hartman has a chorus that to or the to it.