Poverty and Antitheatricality
Form and Formlessness in Latin American Literature, Art, and Theory

Stephen Buttes (Author)

9781978844629

Hardback, published 17 June 2025

200 pages, 2 color and 11 B-W images
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.399 kg

"Engaging and polemical, Buttes's study shows the inadequacy of contemporary theories to understand poverty in terms of exploitation and dispossession, instead turning it into a second nature from which it is impossible to escape." - José Eduardo González (author of Appropriating Theory: Ángel Rama's Critical Work) "Buttes provides a compelling analysis of why experiential and transhistorical accounts of poverty are inadequate and how Latin American literature and film can help us move beyond them." - Ericka Beckman (author of Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age)

Poverty and Antitheatricality argues that many major analytical approaches today misunderstand the problem of poverty by emphasizing its status as an experience. These experiential models transform poverty from a specific socioeconomic status lived in a particular historical sequence into a transhistorical presence of marginality that is not only inevitable but necessary. Embedded in capitalist, socialist, and populist forms of socioeconomic organization, these models paradoxically suggest that if we want to have a world free of poverty, we must always have the poor and their experience of formlessness. Taking up the paired terms-form and formlessness-Stephen Buttes demonstrates how they sustain not only debates about poverty and its political role within modernity but also the idea of the work of art within the history of modernism. Offering critiques of critical theory alongside new readings of both canonical and little-studied Latin American authors and artists, Poverty and Antitheatricality makes a compelling case that understanding the kind of problem the work of art is opens up overlooked but essential pathways to understanding poverty and the kind of problem it is.

Introduction