How does literature represent poverty? Is poverty available for representation? The title of this seminar is taken from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, which, in turn, subverts Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty. In it, Marx critiques the approach taken by Proudhon and other anarchist, communist, or socialist “theoreticians” who assume that economic categories exist independently of history. According to Marx, “so long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society.” A similar critique might be leveled at today’s writers and critics: when literature and literary criticism engage with poverty at all, do they merely reduce it to an ahistorical economic category? What forms of reification, alienation, and exploitation does the literary assumption that poverty is available for representation produce?

This seminar asks what literature owes to people experiencing poverty. At a time when 847 million people live in extreme poverty—95% of whom are in the Global South—it seeks to bring together research on the representation, history, and ontological status of poverty. Unlike Marx’s “theoreticians,” who “see in poverty nothing but poverty,” scholars analyzing poverty through other frameworks—such as ethical demand, affective complexity, geopolitical disparities, aesthetic fetishization, and state failure—are strongly encouraged to submit abstracts. Papers may respond to such questions as: how should poverty be represented, if at all? Beyond an economic category, can poverty be conceived as an aesthetic, metaphysical, or phenomenological category? How is the concept of poverty entangled with conceptions of lack, deprivation, or destitution? How does the global distribution of poverty reflect the ongoing injuries of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, globalization, and ecological catastrophe?