Cruz, Cynthia: The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

Repeater, paperback Publication Date: July 20, 2021 Publisher Marketing: What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation. To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost. Excluded, marginalised, and subjected to violence, the working class is also deemed by those in power to not exist. We are left with a choice between assimilation into middle-class values and culture, leaving our working-class origins behind, or total annihilation. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how this choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers -- including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more -- and the resultant Freudian melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins t