Rebellious lives, beautiful experiences

An unexpected 20th-century history and a compelling narrative of young “radical thinkers who, tirelessly, imagined other ways of living and never stopped believing that the world could be different.”

In "Vidas rebeldes, belas experiências", the renowned American researcher and author Saidiya Hartman reconstructs the lives of the first generation of Black women born in the United States after emancipation, who aspired to true freedom.

Venturing into the unknown, they became pioneers of free love, queer identities, mutual aid, and free motherhood. A vanguard hitherto omitted, whose struggle for freedom forged what became the modern world.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019

SAIDIYA HARTMAN (New York, 1961) is a researcher, professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and author of the works Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), and the present work, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019.

Hartman has dedicated herself to identifying the legacy of slavery in modern American life and rescuing from oblivion the stories of lives that are poorly documented and systematically excluded from historical archives. Recognized with various academic distinctions and research grants, such as the MacArthur and the Fulbright, she was named, in 2022, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also an International Writer of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom.