| Recognizing the poor is double-edged. In one sense, the poor are "marginalized," invisible to the social and political recognition that might ensure equal access to opportunities, so their fight is to be seen, to be recognized. In another sense, recognizing the poor may entail seeing what we expect to see---destitution, misery, abjection. We recognize what we already know, without realizing the unconscious biases and assumptions of prior knowledge. Narratives that fit our expectations fail to critique habituated systems of power and authority, and so participate in marginalization.;How do we represent disempowerment without disempowering? While the question of how ethically to represent the poor has deep historical roots, it is particularly pressing under the weight of recent globalization. The dominant narrative of globalization asserts that people, ideas, and capital are increasingly fluid and mobile. The danger of this narrative is that it makes invisible the immobility that defines the poor, while it fortifies neoliberalism's fiction of endless upward mobility through blind faith in ideas of development. Reading Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Mia Couto's The Last Flight of the Flamingo, Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, and Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, this study examines narratives that force us to recognize---to see, but also to re-think---those invisible to globalization's grand narrative, the marginalized poor in the global South. |
