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 to become someone only to find that they lose themselves in the process. Part memoir
part cultural theory and part polemic The Melancholia of Class shows us how we can resist
assimilation uplifting and carrying our working-class origins and communities with us as we
break the barriers of the middle-class world. There are so many of us all of us waiting. If we
came together who knows what we could do.
