How Black Was My Valley: Life and Fate in a Post-Industrial Heartland

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.

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 Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (Columbia University Press, 2020). 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. He was also recently the co-host of Books with BraNd, a live and recorded series with the comedian and actor Russell Brand where they explored timeless literary classics.