Writing the Ghetto, Inventing the Slum

“Writing the Ghetto, Inventing the Slum” traces the changing definitions, representations, and meanings of the “slum” and the “ghetto” in American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. The chapter considers writings by Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, Hutchins Hapgood, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, and Claude Brown, reading them alongside turn-of-the-century muckraking, Chicago School sociology, and “culture of poverty” social science discourse. Instead of a single, overarching story, the imaginative literature analyzed in the chapter offers competing and divergent representations of the “slum” and the “ghetto” as places of cultural and linguistic vibrancy and vitality, but also as places of poverty and pathology, as zones of acculturation, but also as zones of inassimilable ethnic and racial difference. These contradictory understandings within and between texts reveal the unsettled status, historically changing nature, and enduring fascination of the “slum” and the “ghetto” in the American imagination.