“Todo parece ocurrir en el presente:” Poverty and Representation Before and After Subaltern Studies

• In Event: Narraciones y visualizaciones de la pobreza en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XXI

Abstract

At the heart of the project set out by Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in the early 1990s were, as Ileana Rodríguez points out, “two essential postulates[:] . . . to continue placing our faith in the projects of the poor . . . [and] to find ways of producing scholarship to demonstrate that in the failure to recognize the poor as active, social, political and heuristic agents reside the limits and thresholds of our present hermeneutical and political condition” (3). While during the past two decades, a number of scholars have championed subaltern political projects (e.g. Beverley and others) or used deconstruction and poststructuralism to critique both systems of representation (particularly literary representation) and academic projects including subaltern studies itself (e.g. Moreiras, Williams, Beasley-Murray and many others), these critiques have paid insufficient attention to poverty as a conceptual apparatus, one that, as Moraña has pointed out, was in existence before the rise of subaltern studies and one that has persisted even as it has undergone significant changes over the past two decades in the fields of economics, sociology and philosophy. These new conceptual approaches (particularly the capabilities approach elaborated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and extended by Sabina Alkire) have led to demands for new forms of representation (statistical and otherwise). This paper will suggest that the competing tendencies motivating these two camps—one marking the impossibility of representing the poor (their inevitable invisibility) and the other signaling the insufficiency but desirability of new representations of poverty (the impulse to make the poor visible)—are at work within contemporary Latin American literature that has seen the rise of “new realisms,” the resurgence of Neobaroque literatures and other experimental strategies. Focusing primarily on Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Iris (2014), a futuristic “novela minera”, this presentation will examine the role contemporary forms of literary representation can play in the struggle against poverty by making it visible in the present as both a lived reality and a problem of thought that can and should be engaged by literary and cultural criticism.

Author

• Stephen M Buttes, Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne