BOOKS
REHEARSALS FOR LIVING
BY ROBYN MAYNARD AND LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON
FOREWORD BY RUTH WILSON GILMORE; AFTERWORD BY ROBIN D.G. KELLEY
“This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.” —Dionne Brand
A revolutionary collaboration about the world we’re living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.
When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here.
Rehearsals is a captivating book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit. In a genre-defying exchange, the authors collectively envision the possibilities for more liberatory futures during a historic year of Indigenous land defense, prison strikes, and global-Black-led rebellions against policing. By articulating to each other Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, and the long-disavowed histories of slavery and colonization that have brought us to this moment in the first place, Maynard and Simpson create something new: a vital demand for a different way forward, and a poetic call to dream up new ways of ordering earthly life.
Rehearsals for Living was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literary Non-fiction and a finalist for the Heritage Toronto Book Award.
Knopf (Canada) Haymarket (US/UK).
Translated and published in French in 2024.
READ SELECTED REVIEWS
POLICING BLACK LIVES: STATE VIOLENCE IN CANADA FROM SLAVERY TO THE PRESENT
This book should be read not only by those who have a specific interest in Canadian histories and social justice movements but by anyone interested in the abolitionist and revolutionary potential of the Black Lives Matters movement more broadly — Angela Y. Davis
The bestselling first edition of Policing Black Lives became a mainstay of bookshelves and classrooms across North America and Europe as the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada.
This revised and expanded edition updates the original text in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020 and offers new insights on how to build liveable futures without policing.
Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, award-winning scholar and activist Robyn Maynard traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions. Maynard sheds light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the ubiquity of Black resistance. Policing Black Lives is the first book of its kind: a flagship abolitionist text that lays the grounds for the abolition of policing, incarceration and borders as the only path forward if Black liberation is to be achievable in Canada and globally.
The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.
Fernwood Publishing (Canada) Duke University Press (US/World). Forthcoming October 2025.