The Price of Living

“A magnificently ambitious book whose strengths include rigorous and consummate scholarship, genuine intellectual and ethico-political passion, a willingness to take risks, a fresh and invigorating perspective on the theme of poverty, and finally an organic brilliance that testifies to a sensibility that seeks to connect Home with World, academic thinking with vernacular reality.” - Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, author of History, the Human, and the World Between

“S. Shankar turns away from sociological approaches to global poverty and finds important resources in fictional works that convey the affective and cultural impact of poverty from the perspective of those impacted by it. Turning to scenarios of resistance and alternative social formations, Shankar addresses poverty as a cause for abolition rather than amelioration. Persuasive and with impressive scholarly grounding, Shankar’s argument presents an important contribution both to the literature on poverty and to postcolonial and leftist theory.” - David Lloyd, author of Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics