How Black Was My Valley
Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland
by Brad Evans
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Pub Date Apr 09 2024 | Archive Date Not set
Repeater Books | Repeater
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
“Anybody interested in the history of working class resistance, and people’s daily struggles when confronting deep poverty blighting post-industrial communities should read this devastating study”
-- Paul Mason
“Evans’ beautifully crafted words and thoughts are now seared into me forever. Sit with each chapter for a while as its true devastation dawns on you. Thank God these stories are now being told. The boy of the valleys has come home and roared.”
-- Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster
“A cliche-free, myth-lancing account of a ‘Coal Colony’ discarded by the powers that were after tearing use and relentless abuse. Sometimes lyrical, never romantic he offers analytical passion, acidic candour, some love, deep melancholy, dry mirth, scorn for nostalgia about ‘a past that never really existed’ and an unbreakable grip on truth.”
-- Neil Kinnock
“How Black Was My Valley is more than a memoir. Each carefully constructed sentence, every beautifully recorded or imagined moment, is placed alongside tragedy’s reality, ensuring that the ‘view from below’, as lived by the people who remain in the grip of economic marginalisation, is heard.”
--Phil Scraton, author of Hillsborough: The Truth
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781913462840 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 400 |
Available on NetGalley
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