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.<\/p>\n
How Black Was My Valley is a people\u2019s history of the former mining communities of South Wales.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It travels with devastating and yet humane insight across the dark shadows of the valley\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This book launch coincides with the exhibition ‘How Black was my Valley’ by Chantal Meza, paintings commissioned for the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brad Evans launches his new book, ‘How Black was my Valley’. Providing a searing insight and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43368,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"Tribe__Tickets_Plus__Commerce__WooCommerce__Main","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[355,358],"class_list":["post-43367","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tribe_events_cat-concerts-and-events","tribe_events_cat-talk-and-lecture","cat_concerts-and-events","cat_talk-and-lecture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"