Relation Between the Structure of Power and Poverty

Through several texts to include Bell Hooks’ articles Narratives of Struggle and Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor, Natasha Tretheway’s memoir High Rollers, and the film Trouble the Water directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal illustrate how the poor are often dehumanized by a higher dominating structure of power that belittles the poor because of preconceived notions from several forms of media and experiences. Many of the underclass were overlooked for service and stability because of the idea of civilians having preset ranks of class and agency or even the treatment, depiction, and resistance of poverty that was branded as impoverishment and acts of dehumanizing the ones most in need. Each of the sources express their concern with the idea of poverty and how society tends to embody the agreement and depiction of key issues that are raised when understanding poverty, and what the meaning of poor is in the country. Hooks, Trethewey, Lessin and Deal, also express the idea of resistance towards poverty and what society sets poverty to be, including class and agency. Also, these writers explain how stereotypical views of poverty typically come from dominant media, to include commercials, movies, TV shows, etc.

Bell Hooks’ article Narratives of Struggle and Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor both support and offer an explanation about how the poor and the categorized underclass people have no power, and the many struggles faced by the “economically disenfranchised”. Also, Natasha Trethewey’s High Rollers and the film Trouble the Water directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, further exemplifies how civilization was either dehumanized or neglected of aid through first hand encounters and experiences.

Narrati...

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... has so much control over impoverishment and its sufferers, leading them to believe that how the government is treating, depicting, and resisting the poor is the right thing, due to the lack of their own self-knowledge.

Works Cited

Greene, Stuart, and April Lidinsky, eds. "From Inquiry to Academic Writing." Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (1994): 193-201. Rpt. in Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 431-37. Print.

Hooks, Bell. Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing. Philomena Mariani, ed. Dia Center for the Arts, 1991. Print

Trethewey, Natasha. Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Athens: U of Georgia, 2010. 83-125. Print.

Trethewey, Natasha. "Mississippi Meditation: A Poet Looks Beyond Katrina." Interview with Terry Gross. Fresh Air. National Public Radio. 18 Aug. 2010. 15 Sept. 2010. .