The Poverty of Literature (ACLA)
Houston
Organization: American Comparative Literature Association
Event: ACLA
American Comparative Literature Association 2027 Annual Meeting
University of Houston
May 20-23
The Poverty of Literature
Organizer:
Gabriel Quigley, University of Victoria (gabrielquigley@uvic.ca)
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?
Possible topics:
- Poverty and realism; poverty and genre
- The ethics of speaking for the poor
- Testimony, life writing, and first-person accounts of poverty
- Poverty and racial capitalism
- Postcolonial and decolonial frameworks for poverty
- Poverty and ecological catastrophe; climate precarity
- Poverty and intersectionality (race, gender, sexuality, disability)
- “Poverty porn,” sentimentality, and voyeurism
- Working-class literature and labor
- Poverty in the Global South; imperialism and uneven development
- Urban and rural poverty as literary landscapes
- Homelessness and houselessness
- Poverty and the archive
- Poverty and affect: shame, solidarity, rage
- The literary canon and class; institutional gatekeeping
- Austerity, welfare, and the state in literature
- Migration, displacement, and border crossing
- Literature and human rights
- Poverty as aesthetic, metaphysical, or phenomenological category
- Poverty and ontology; being, lack, and deprivation
- Bare life and destitution
ACLA Seminar Description can be accessed here: https://www.acla.org/seminar/63e1eb87-fe99-49c9-aac0-517ccf904102.
ACLA Paper Submission link: https://www.acla.org/cfp/2b603883-5d9b-44ae-a485-c732ba80d4bf/submit-paper.
Papers can be submitted until September 22, 2026.
Gabriel Quigley