New book: Poverty in Common: Politics of Community Action

Posted by on April 16, 2012

Alyosha Goldstein
POVERTY IN COMMON: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century
(Duke University Press, 2012)

“Poverty in Common is a highly original and nuanced study of how ‘the government of poverty’ at home and abroad became central to postwar US liberalism and its distinctive precipitates of violence and reform, force and freedom, democracy and empire.”
—Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black Is a Country

After the Second World War, the idea that local community action was indispensable for the alleviation of poverty was broadly embraced by policymakers, social scientists, international development specialists, and grassroots activists. Governmental efforts to mobilize community action in the name of democracy served as a volatile condition of possibility through which poor people and dispossessed groups negotiated the tension between calls for self-help and demands for self-determination in the context of the Cold War and global decolonization. Poverty in Common suggests new ways to think about the relationship between liberalism, government, and inequality with implications for current debates over the “end of welfare” and neoliberalism in the United States.

Drawing on oral histories, local program records, community newspapers, policy documents, and records of public hearings, Alyosha Goldstein analyzes a compelling but often overlooked series of historical episodes: Progressive era reform as a precursor to community development during the Cold War; how the language of “underdevelopment” articulated ideas about poverty and foreignness; the use of poverty as a crucible of interest group politics; and how radical groups critically reframed the question of community action in anticolonial terms. He shows how approaches to poverty were linked to the racialized and gendered negotiation of boundaries — between foreign and domestic, empire and nation, violence and order, dependency and autonomy — in the mid-twentieth-century United States.

About the author:

Alyosha Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

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