Description
"Invisible People" uses an interdisciplinary approach (history, American studies, ethics, and literary criticism) to examine both the history of rural poverty in the American South and representations of the rural poor from the 1930s to the present. In particular, it looks at African-American poverty in the small town and rural South, the more recent explosion in Latino poverty in the southeastern states, and white poverty in the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. What are the particular histories and conditions of poor people living outside America's cities? Why, since the 1930s, has rural and small town poverty been largely invisible to many middle-class Americans? How have poor people represented themselves, and when and how have their voices reached other Americans? When popular culture and public policy have focused on rural southern poverty (African Americans in the 1960s, rural southern whites in the 1970s), how has this attention affected the economic, political, and psychological status of poor people? Throughout, "Invisible People" pays close attention, historically and theoretically, to the interaction between representations of poverty--what popular culture producers, local and federal government agencies, economists, people of faith, and poor people themselves think poverty is--and what Americans choose to do about the stubborn persistence of poverty in the richest nation on earth. The goal is to help spark renewed debate about the contradiction between America's democratic ideals and American poverty. Fall 2006, Spring 2007 to Summer 2007
