The Problem of Representing the Poor

This chapter considers the difficulty of representing poverty in literature, film, and other art forms, particularly when most of those representations come from middle-class producers. The problematics of having the writer or artist be of the same category as those being portrayed are explored, and the vexing issue of authenticity is replaced with the idea of accountability. The other problem of representation has to do with the limited set of stereotypical characteristics that are used to describe the poor. An analysis of films like Parasite and Roma reveals this problematic. The rise of the novel and the rise of representative democracy offer an opportunity to consider the relation between political and artistic representation and to explore the idea of representational inequality.