Amid the overlapping crises of a pandemic, ecological disaster, and global capitalism, two leading Black and Indigenous feminist theorists ask one another: what do liberated lands, minds, and bodies look like? These letters are part debate, part dialogue, and part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp thinkers, sending notes to each other during a stormy present. Featuring a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and an afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley.
Robyn Maynard is an award-winning Black feminist scholar-activist based in Toronto, and the author of the national bestseller Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present. Her writings on policing, feminism, abolition, and Black liberation are taught widely across North America and Europe.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and artist who is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh. For the past two decades, as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured extensively at universities across Canada and the United States. She is also the author of eight books, including the nonfiction A Short History of the Blockade; the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize; and the novel This Accident of Being Lost, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, was a national bestseller and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
ISBN: 9781642596892
Publication date: June 28, 2022
“As we collectively and unevenly live through sedimented colonialities, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard draw out a political vision that emerges from epistolary connections—letters, animated by stories, that seek out, engage, imagine, and narrate different kinds and types of liberation. Accentuated by entangled black-indigenous histories and geographies, Rehearsals for Living actualizes friendship as correspondence, modeling a mode of togetherness that we can practice, learn from, and revise.” —Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds and Dear Science and Other Stories.
"Rehearsals for Living is a profound and sublime work of memory, witnessing, refusal, dreaming. In the trenchant tradition of Black and Indigenous feminisms, this brilliant book moves us away from the language of crisis or victimhood to the precise and intimate encounters of kinship and liberation. The letters between Maynard and Simpson magnificently shapeshift and engage on multiple levels, and in doing so, rigorously demand an accounting for horrific violences while illuminating lives and worlds anew. A masterclass in literary form, ethical orientations, and collective futures." —Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule, Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
"Rehearsals for Living is an intellectually fierce dialogue about our colonial present by two of the most renowned scholar-activists working today. In a time of incredible uncertainty, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard show that the shared and divergent histories of Black and Indigenous communities are foundational to the building of a better world for all." —Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
Join Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for a discussion on abolitionist horizons for a world in crisis, hosted by Naomi Murakawa.
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