How Black Was My Valley

Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland

Brad Evans

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English

Repeater Books
14 May 2024

Social & cultural history; Social & political philosophy; Poverty & unemployment; Political science & theory

Providing a searing insight and honest portrayal of post-industrial communities ravaged by decades of abandonment, How Black Was My Valley is the story of lives defined by poverty, catastrophe and the fading dreams of better futures.

Providing a searing insight and honest portrayal of post-industrial communities ravaged by decades of abandonment, How Black Was My Valley is the story of lives defined by poverty, catastrophe and the fading dreams of better futures.

How Black Was My Valley is a people's history of the former mining communities of South Wales.

Weaving together the personal with the political, it offers a damning depiction of the hardship and suffering, the tragedy and pain, as a politically abandoned people went from powering the British Empire and the Great Wars, to a broken post-industrial community, lost in time.

It travels with devastating and yet humane insight across the dark shadows of the valley's history. In doing so, it deals with disaster and resistance; memory and landscapes of despair; the brutal past and the neglected present; hardship and poverty; unemployment and isolation; lack of opportunity and the normalisation of hopelessness; death and suffering; structural violence and everyday subjugation; onto the crises of white male subjectivity and the exponential rise in drug abuse and personal suicide, whose troubling effects can no longer be easily contained within its mountainous walls.

This is not a story of resilience. Instead, readers are taken on a journey into an open wound, whose once silent screams can no longer be ignored.

By: Brad Evans
Imprint: Repeater Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781913462840
ISBN 10: 1913462846
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 14 May 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Born into conditions of poverty in the Rhondda valleys of South Wales, Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist and writer, whose work specialises on the problem of violence. He is author of over 20 books and edited volumes, including most recently State of Disappearance (with Chantal Meza, McGill-Queens university Press- 2023). He previously led a dedicated columns/series on violence in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Brad currently serves as Chair of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom, where is he founder and director of the Centre for the Study of Violence. web-www.brad-evans.co.uk

Reviews for How Black Was My Valley: Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland

“Brad has gone down the mines and extracted a wealth of history that had been covered in soot and given serious literary attention to a vital yet overlooked aspect of working class and south Welsh life... a passionate, political, and personal retelling of the history of a place most people aim to avoid.”