Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It [Hardcover]

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. InPoor Things, Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized.USLennard J. Davis critiques literature written by the middle and upper classes that depict the poor through harmful stereotypes and argues that writers who were once poor are best positioned to write about the lived experience of poverty.Lennard J. Davis is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author of many books, includingEnabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights.“Lennard J. Davis’sPoor Thingsprovocatively argues that those who write about poor people but are not or have not themselves been poor are governed by various tropes and protocols that serve to depict the poor as revolting and ultimately less human than the rich. The implications of the argument go well beyond the nineteenth-century focus that Davis adopts, having resonlÓ4