Wayward Shuddering, Beautiful Tremors

Abstract

This chapter takes Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as a launchpad. Instead of offering a “reading” of or a conventional scholarly response to Hartman’s text, this track, as the name states, takes the shape of a remix that emphasizes certain aspects surely present but not necessarily centered in Wayward Lives. It is a recombination of Hartman’s sentences, words, and ideas, crossfading them with R&B lyrics so as to unearth the messy feelings, both negative and positive, behind the numbers, skewed gender ratios, archival intervals, and so many other “official” data pertaining to Black life.