Draft:Wayward

The most common definition of wayward is deviant, unpredictable, and contrary to norms. In black studies, however, "wayward" imparts a particular conceptual ground from which to discuss black girlhood. For instance, Sadiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019) focuses on black women and girls often disparaged as unruly, scrupulous, and pathological. Hartman reclaims and employs waywardness not only as a genre of black life for girls and women in the ghettos of the early 20th century. Wayward Lives presents waywardness as its own methodology, a force against the conventions of historical archive and knowledge production.

Hartman's work extends and complicated a much broader lineage of the term's usage. For instance, W.E.B. Du Bois, who appears as a quasi-fictional character in Wayward Lives, produced his own fictional portrait of the early 20th century. The book's principal character, a young girl named Zora, is described as "wayward." "The heightened alarm over the “wayward girl” emerged in the 1910s as immigration, migration, and urbanization transformed the United States, and Progressive Era reform campaigns around prostitution and social “vice”—intended to police unconventional social and sexual relationships in the modernizing social order—reached full tilt." Through Hartman's work, wayward and its historical location as an indictment moral and sexual experimentation moves into the present as a useful model for studies of black life.