ABSTRACT
Poverty is a durable face of global politics, one that invades our global public space and imagination with sustained vitality, a face we wish would disappear the moment we see it. We seem to know the poor even though we have not met them. They are an abstraction we embrace, a concrete part in ourselves we deny. Poverty is one of the most visible signs of otherness. It is the face of difference, of those who are removed from our space and experience, a connection to others not like us. Poverty consolidates the material divide between us and them, an ideational divide (that is, a divide in terms of how we understand the world). Something tells us that the poor are in a way like us, something we fear the most. Perhaps the anxiety that we could become like them gives us the inspiration to think about helping them, reaching out to them, without becoming like them.
