IN THIS LAVISHLY illustrated collection of activist essays, articles and reviews from the late 70s to the present, the noted author of The Wages of Whiteness, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and other pathbreaking critical studies of America's "white problem" focuses on the complex issue of MISERABILISM in its many and invariably oppressive forms.
David Roediger is renowned for his brilliant writings on whiteness, but few readers acknowledge what lay at the root of his work: his abiding hatred of all forms of oppression and exploitation. If you didn't know this before, History Against Misery ought to make it clear, for Roediger has put together a powerful collection of rants and chants against miserabilism, and a surrealist road map to liberated futures. This is one of those books we must keep close to us as we struggle to overthrow misery once and for all. -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
An exquisite corpus of work! Like any great history, Roediger's work is an act of rescue and restoration. The words, acts and deeds have always been out there, and here he meticulously gathers and reconstructs for us what has been willfully over-looked and disappeared. It is to the summer of our discontent that the surrealist brings us a wintry elation: humor, a poetics of resistance, purposeful deviance motivated by genuine compassion and a love of truth. -Blake Schwarzenbach, musician/writer
In this terrific collection of essays, the great radical historian David Roediger digs deep into his engagement with surrealism, sports, and subversion. It is unusual to read someone so good on such a range of topics, from Travis Tritt to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Andre Breton to Bugs Bunny. Those familiar with his other books will find here Another Side of David Roediger, but in this book he brings it all back home. -Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
This wonderful collection of essays is not only a powerful indictment of late capitalism-the system that "dulls and narrows human desire"-but also a fascinating survey of resistance voices, from the IWW to the Surrealists, from the "Chicago Idea" Anarchists to Black Liberation. David Roediger persuasively shows that rebel poetry, free imagination, workers' direct action and Black freedom struggles are all part of the same great movement against the established order and its (miserable) ideology of "whiteness." -Michael Lowy, author of On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (1993)
