9781915672223
206 pp
PB 197 x 130 mm
Mono
£10.99 / $14.95
Philosophy / Politics
World rights available
The left often views alienation as something to be resisted or overcome, but could it actually form the basis of our emancipation?
In Embracing Alienation, Todd McGowan offers a completely different take on alienation, claiming that the effort to overcome it is not a radical response to the current state of things but a failure to see the constitutive power of alienation for all of us. Instead of trying to overcome alienation and accede to an unalienated existence, he argues, we should instead redeem alienation as an existential and political program.
Relying on the tradition of dialectical thought and psychoanalytic theory, Embracing Alienation reveals a new way of conceiving how we measure progress — or even if progress should be the aim at all.
TODD MCGOWAN teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Enjoyment Right and Left, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Only a Joke Can Save Us, and Capitalism and Desire, among others.
9781913462840
344 pp
PB 234 x 153 mm
Mono
£16.99 / $24.95
Politics / Memoir
World rights available
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, suffering, tragedy and pain of a broken post-industrial community lost in time. It covers the disaster and resistance; memory and landscapes of despair; the brutal past and the neglected present; hardship and poverty; unemployment and isolation; the normalisation of suffering; structural violence and everyday subjugation 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 poverty in the Rhondda valleys of South Wales, BRAD EVANS is Chair of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath. He is author of over 20 books, most recently Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity.