Quite simply, this book is extraordinary. The text is coherent, theoretically and analytically rich, and above all, readable. The theoretical grounding for the book is complex, but the author unpacks her main arguments about racial capitalism and surplus populations lucidly and in an understandable manner. Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, Masaryk University, Czech Republic; co-author of Historicizing Roma in Central Europe : Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice
This book forcefully re-centres race and class in East-Central European and post-socialist scholarship. By bridging Marxian accounts of reserve armies of labour with theories of racial capitalism, Cernuáková provides a crucial lens on contemporary capitalist racialisation and the Roma question. Sara R. Farris, Goldsmiths University of London; author of In the Name of Womens Rights
'Cernuáková boldly shows what a theoretically astute urban ethnography can do. Surplus lives offers us a deep understanding of how class and race operate on and within the lives of Roma people in the Czech Republic and how central this is for postsocialist industrial policy.' Don Kalb, University of Bergen; author of Value and Worthlessness
Surplus Lives under Racial Capitalism is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how racialisation and capitalism intertwine in contemporary Europe. Through powerful ethnographic insight, Barbora Cernuáková reveals how precarious work, segregation, and debt are not peripheral issues but central mechanisms producing a racialised surplus population. Urgent, rigorous, and deeply illuminating, this book is essential reading for scholars, students, and all those concerned with inequality and social justice. Angéla Kóczé, Associate Professor of Romani Studies at Central European University; author of Romani women at the edge of neoliberal Europe: Discursive emancipation and structural violence -- .
