The Idea of Global Poverty

This chapter examines popular constructions of global poverty, bringing them into dialogue with ways of understanding deprivation and suffering in terms of an ongoing history of (neo)imperial exploitation. The idea of global poverty is produced through metaphors such as the development ladder, the International Poverty Line, the notion of “poverty traps,” and the figure of the black or brown woman in the global South who functions as the face of poverty while she is also romanticized as its solution. These metaphors attribute poverty to nature and culture, rather than politics and economics, specifically processes of racial capitalism. By focusing on the poverty line, popular development discourse ignores race (the colour line) as well as structures and systems that produce poverty (power lines). The chapter critically examines the discursive construction of global poverty in order to trouble the fundamental premise of humanitarian representational practices: The notion that aid is the best or only way to alleviate suffering and deprivation.