History Against Misery

A new collection of essays, most of them short, activist pieces, culled from the last 20 years of Roediger’s work, and touching on most of his familiar themes of history, culture, whiteness, art, politics, and change.

“David Roediger is renowned for his brilliant writings on whiteness, but few readers acknowledge what lat at the root of his work: his abiding hatred of all forms of oppression and exploitation...Roediger has put together a powerful collection of rants and chants against miserabilism, and a surrealist road map to liberated futures.” [Robin D G Kelley]

“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]