Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Many biographical entries on Gladys Bentley refer to Bentley by she/her pronouns, whereas Hartman uses he/him. What is the significance of Hartman’s choice? What does this discrepancy say about the relationship between gender identity and the language we use?

What is extraordinary about the ordinary lives of the northern, urban Black poor at the turn of the 20th century?

What is the revolutionary value of the collective “chorus” over well-known individual Black figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells?

What is the role of class in the interracial (between Black and white people) and intraracial conflicts (among Black people) around strategies for social reform?

How does W. E. B. Du Bois’s position as a sociologist strengthen or limit his project of understanding poor, Black, urban life?

Hartman frequently describes 20th century conditions as the “afterlife of slavery.” Analyze the various levels of continuity between the conditions of the plantation and the legal and social conditions of Black life in the early 1900s.

Why does Hartman historically situate this project at the turn of the 20th century rather than earlier (the Reconstruction era) or later (the Great Depression)? How would the text and its arguments be different if it focused on a different time?

There are excerpted blues and jazz lyrics interspersed in the text of the book. What do these lyrics contribute to the text, and how does Hartman’s project relate to the subject of music?