Summary Of Haidya Hartman The Terrible Beauty Of The Slums

“The Terrible Beauty of the Slums” by Säidya Hartman features a carefully crafted narrative meant to illustrate the incompleteness of historical archives that fail to capture the hope in intimate Black life. Hartman’s work is a genre-defying text that refuses categorization due to its unconventional rhetoric. Typically, readers assume that Hartman’s purpose is simply to liberate the young Black girls from dehumanizing stereotypes by undermining the othering gaze of the outsider, the perpetrators of surveillance and racism. This assumption fails to take into account Hartman’s choice to place readers in the role of the undermined outsider. If we do not explore the implications of having the role of the outsider imposed on us, then we fail to

However, Hartman’s note on method informs us otherwise. Her project is to liberate them from the inherently racist label describing them as the worst elements in a “human sewer” (4). By subjecting the young Black girls to scrutiny instead of retrospective praise, Hartman’s actions are unexpected. For example, Hartman chooses to identify them by their intersection between age, gender, and race. Keeping in mind that gender and race are social constructs, the young Black girls are described by societal labels instead of with their names, which would pay homage to their heritage and humanize them. In another unexpected choice, Hartman gives more page space, regarding who speaks the most, to the outsiders. If Hartman’s intent is to liberate the young Black girls, why would she give more room to the outsiders, the supposed perpetrators of confinement? Initial observations would lead to the conclusion that Hartman does not liberate the young Black girls at

But after this vulnerable moment of intimate Black life, the passage ends with the voice of the outsiders who view the young Black girls as threatening. At the mention of insurrection, Hartman’s ironic use of the voice of the outsider undermines the content of their words. Contributing to the undermining of the outsiders is the awareness that the narrative of the outsiders comes at the expense of surveillance that consumes Black intimate life. The subject of the intimate scene turns to “elude capture” (7) from the hungry gaze of the outsiders. Outsiders, sociologists like Hartman included, perpetuate the struggle of surveillance that undermines their rhetoric that intends to tear down the young Black girls. The style of the outsider’s voice serves to undermine their own argument, and inadvertently liberates the young Black girls from degrading