On Wednesday 29th October 2025, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman. We will meet at Redz Youth Hub, 6 Threadneedle St, GL5 1AF. Entry is free and anyone interested in the book is welcome – you don’t need to have read it to join us. See below for more information.

October is Black History Month and while this isn’t the only book of Black history we are discussing this year, it is a book that explore Black history.

Wayward Lives… look at how, at the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.

Below in our resources section you can find a link to buy the book at a discount, content notes, free audio/visual resources and a 20 page excerpt from the book. There is also more information about the book and Stroud Radical Reading Group events.

Entry to the reading group session is free and everyone is welcome – you do not need to have attended previous sessions, and we do our best to make the sessions welcoming to people who have not been to reading groups or similar settings like university seminars before.

We encourage people to read the whole book, but you are welcome to attend to listen to the discussion without reading any of it. An excerpt, podcast interview, and youtube video are available for those who do not have the time or money for the whole book.

Content notes:

Graphic: Racism, Racial slurs, Rape

Moderate: Sexual violence, Domestic abuse, Sexual assault

Also mentioned: Pedophilia, Slavery, Sexual harassment

Taken from Storygraph – click for more detail

About the book:

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that Black women in the generations born after emancipation instigated in the USA. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.

These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.

About the author

Saidiya Hartman is an American academic and writer focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a professor at Columbia University in their English department. Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.

As well as Wayward Lives, she is the author Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)

Resources

• Buy Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman – RRP £12.99, £11.04 with discount (saving £1.95). To get the 15% discount: Look at your “basket”, and enter the “couponcode” 25stroudradical. Pick up book from Nailsworth, Tetbury or Chalford shops, or get books delivered to your door for £3.50 postage. If posting books, you may wish to buy other books we are reading this year.
• Read a free excerpt from the book: “A Minor Figure: While searching for photographs that depict black young women and girls living free in the second and third generations born after slavery, Saidiya Hartman finds a disturbing image.” (7,000 words, approx 30 minute reading time).
• Listen to a 1 hour podcast featuring author Saidiya Hartman in conversation about her work with writer and activist Lola Olufemi (whose book Feminism Interrupted we read in June 2021).
• Watch a 1 hour video of a talk by author Saidiya Hartman reading from and discussing the book in November 2019 (embedded below).

About our events

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover venue hire costs – please bring some cash if you can afford it (a few pounds would be great).

We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. We do not want the sessions to feel like school – the idea is that everyone has something to contribute, even if primarily through finding the discussion texts difficult and having questions with other attendees can attempt to answer.

To ensure marginalised people feel welcome, we encourage care and thoughtful contributions that respect people’s identities and lives. We are an LGBTQ+ inclusive and anti-racist space.

Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing.

There is an opportunity for more informal discussion after the session in the Ale House pub for anyone who wants to continue their evening.

About the venue

The venue for this session is Redz Youth Hub, a hub for organising, creativity, and community building. It’s a free space for young people to host their own events, workshops, and meetups. They’ve been hosting sessions by Mutiny: Stroud’s Youth Assembly and The RYSE – the Radical Youth Space for Educations – see their schedule for the rest of the year here, including sessions on the Peace Movement, Stroud Water riots, and decolonial action.

Redz is in central Stroud, close to the train station and bus station, with nearby stands to lock bikes, and parking for cars nearby at Fawkes Place or Church St car park. It is one street over from John St – for those who have joined recent sessions at Creative Sustainability. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.