Hazim Hardeman

Bio

Hazim Hardeman is a Presidential Scholar and Prize Fellow PhD Candidate in the American Studies program. His dissertation, "Ghetto Adornments: Grief and Poetics in the Black Underclass" argues that contemporary grieving practices among the black poor can be usefully understood as (and through the language of) ghetto adornments. Reading along, rather than against, the grain of the label ghetto and its cognates (such as trifling, cheap, ostentatious, merely ornamental), it argues that the black poor engage in a poetics of rescheduling loss that is corollary to (and in contest of) capitalism's constant rescheduling (rather than resolving) of crises, of which the ghetto is artifactual. Through the very modes of aesthetic expression that elicit the label ghetto (modes of dress, adornment, inscription, music making), the black poor challenge the matter of their grievability through the manner of their grieving--provoking pressing questions about what is a grievable life. 

Prioritizing the poetics, over the political valence of these practices, their mechanics over their potentially insurgent meaning, I contend allows for a more complex portrait into the vexed ways that a relation to constant loss is lived, and for the surfacing of considerations that have been sidelined to the backwaters in aesthetic discourse (specifically questions of sensual gratification, delight, charm, pleasure) and studies of black grief. In this way, the project follows Hortense Spillers in not treating the ghetto and form as alien concepts, but argues instead that the ghetto itself--considered as a spatial, discursive, and axiological designation--operates as a formal constraint which shapes the practices of making that are through-line to the experience of loss. Each chapter reads a grieving practice through the lens of poetic form, device, and strategy, drawing out their workings in relay with readings of black poets across the 20th and 21st centuries, including Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni Lucille Clifton, and Erica Hunt. Reading the poetics of black grief in tandem with the poetry born of, or meditating on, black grieving, I  also show how attending to the former deepens our reading of the strategies that inhere in the latter.

Before Harvard, he completed an A.A. at the Community College of Philadelphia; a B.A. at Temple University, and a M.Phil in History at St Johns College at the University of Oxford (with distinction), where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His work has been supported by The Rhodes Trust, NYU and Harvard’s Mellon Urban Initiative, and The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities, and Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. A poet in addition to his critical practice, one of his poems is forthcoming in The Wallace Stevens Journal.