In a 2009 Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis might lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” Ten years later, however, the consideration of poverty, which has been a focus of the humanistic social sciences, remains on the periphery of literary study. This panel, seeking to correct this disciplinary deformation, will ask what literature and literary criticism uniquely has to offer to understanding poverty and impoverished communities in the U.S. and globally. What theories and methods of reading does this literature demand? What language for talking about poverty does it tender?
This panel will contribute to existing scholarship that attends to poverty as a category in American literature, and to the dilemmas of literary representation it highlights. Studies such as Gavin Jones’s American Hungers (2007) suggest that poverty has not been more widely represented in literary criticism because the treatment of material deprivation as having aesthetic value poses ethical and representational dilemmas. Keith Gandal, author of Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (2007), and Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Trouble with Diversity (2007), agree that the problem of economic privation in U.S. literature has been subsumed by the language of identity. This panel will also respond to recent writing by Michael Denning, who argues in “Representing Global Labor” (2007) and “Wageless Life” (2010) for reassessing the categories of labor and class to account for global poverty, precarity, and unemployment.
This session’s panelists model a range of approaches to reading poverty, including a focus on the role of literary form in capturing the experience of extreme economic hardship and migration; inquiries into the historical development of genre; reading through genre to disclose new forms of antipoverty agency; and the foregrounding of women’s health narratives to complicate contemporary understandings of black care. Opening the session with an examination of how literature grapples with poverty as an aesthetic and formal problem, Joseph Entin’s paper, “Precarious Form,” examines Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel America is in the Heart (1946), in which the narrator observes: “poverty was the thread of my life [that] gave it a rounded meaning." While poverty may create a “rounded meaning,” the novel’s narration of economic hardship, migratory labor, and racial terror does not take a “rounded” literary shape. Rather, Entin argues, the novel’s uneven, fractured form, which draws from 1930s “bottom dog” novels and cinematic noir, defies the narrative continuity that marks traditional immigration stories and proletarian tales of working-class bildung, laying groundwork for postmodern novels of transnational migration.
In his paper, “Where’d You Get That We Shit?” Kinohi Nishikawa develops on the question of form by identifying a peculiar genre of African American writing that flourished in the early days of the Black Power movement: the novel of the black stud. Poor, cast-off, down-and-out: the stud uncomfortably calls to mind the exploitation of black male bodies under slavery and Jim Crow. Yet in novels by Hal Bennett, Cecil Brown, and Frank Marshall Davis, this figure embraces his abject surroundings while rejecting any sense of individual or collective purpose. In offering insight as to why the genre emerged when it did, Nishikawa explains how the stud engenders a critique of both liberal and radical views of the black poor. It thereby aligns the genre with the most iconic stud of the time, Sweet Sweetback, who made the question “Where’d you get that we shit?” famous in Melvin Van Peebles’s movie of 1971.
The second half of the panel shifts focus to how literature defines new narratives of community formation and resilience. In “Freedom Is a Montage,” Irvin Hunt turns to a figure rarely recognized for her literary art: Civil Rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer. Uncovering the history of Hamer’s 680 acre Freedom Farm Cooperative (1969-77), which supplied the poor in the South and Midwest with food, clothes, and homes, Hunt shows how Hamer deployed the genre of montage to plot a social movement in a non-progressivist time. Exhuming her autobiographical speeches, Hunt argues that Hamer broke from the narratives of progress emblematic of Civil Rights Movement discourse: she plotted the present and the future in structures of juxtapositions and cominglings—a kaleidoscopic progression without progress—expanding our prevailing definitions for social movements writ-large.
Clare Callahan’s paper, “Care Not Given,” extends this study of the time of poverty by examining how “weathering”— the sustained exposure to environmental hazards, combined with chronic stressors like poverty and discrimination, that degrade physiological resilience over time—informs the relationship between women’s health and addiction in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Ward links women’s reproductive health to the folk healers’ proficiency in attending to sickness and death, but also to her female characters’ susceptibility to drug abuse. Here, the forms of care that emerge from addiction both resemble and interrupt ecologies of black care. In this way, addiction uncouples resilience from wellbeing, laying bare the weakened bodily defense systems, especially of pregnant women and mothers, that underlie narratives of resilience. In the process, Callahan argues, Ward situates women’s health at the front lines of weathering and as the primary gauge of a community’s capacity to navigate a biopolitics of disposability.