Transclass: Endo- and Exo-writers

This chapter offers an explanation of transclass identity and how it fits into depictions of poverty. The argument is that only people from poverty should create works about poverty. The only way this can happen, given the lack of power among the powerless, is if the agent is a transclass person who had been poor but now is middle class and has the access to media that their new class position entails. The author recounts his own transclass experience and likens that to the experience of exile producing a double consciousness. In contrast to transclass writers, exo-writers (those from outside the culture) have to resort to doing research and going undercover—as did Friedrich Engels, Jack London, Nellie Bly, émile Zola, George Orwell, and others—which has rarely produced accountable results.