PositiveHyperallergicTracks the history of twin study and scholarship in the scientific community, some of which has revealed stories of twins unknowingly separated at birth and making uncannily parallel life choices.
Saidiya Hartman
RaveHyperallergic... clearly presents Hartman’s underlying values as a researcher: that no life is insignificant, that suppressed narratives deserve daylight, that we hold within us the capacity to expand history with our imagination and shared humanity ... I have, in conversation with other writers, debated the merits of speculative nonfiction as a genre, but Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a perfect case study in the necessity of such a genre ... Extending her experiences as a human, as a woman, as a person of color, Hartman is able to convincingly stitch a line between fact an intuition, presenting full narratives on behalf of women that might have otherwise remained single-word entries in the record: vagrant, prostitute, wayward, loose ... The beauty in the wayward, the fiction in the facts, and the thriving existence in the face of a blanked out history are the recurring motifs of Wayward Lives, and as a beautiful experiment in its own right, it shines through as a successful one.
