The Price of Living
The Stories We Tell about the Poor
Will be published approx. on 15. February 2027
Book
Hardback
264 pages
978-1-4780-3475-9 (ISBN)
Description
In The Price of Living, S. Shankar investigates popular and global understandings of poverty through what he calls cultural fictions. Engaging powerful, public, invented stories about the poor, from the Bollywood classic Deewaar to the Parable novels of Octavia Butler, and drawing from thinkers like B. R. Ambedkar, Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Antonio Gramsci, Shankar explores depictions of destitution alongside narratives of poverty that present escape and resistance. Shankar urges a public humanities perspective on poverty through readings of novels and films from Africa, India, and the United States. Using humanistic methodologies that challenge social scientific and policy approaches, he unveils how poverty circulates in the cultural imaginary politically and morally, leading his argument to abolitionism. The Price of Living is a wide-ranging introduction to poverty discourse and an urgent call for poverty abolition.
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Person
S. Shankar is Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and editor of the literary journal Mānoa. He is author of several books of criticism and fiction, including Flesh and Fish Blood and Ghost in the Tamarind.