REHEARSALS FOR LIVING
“Lyrical, visionary, and transcendent … While chronicling the continuing unfolding calamities of settler colonialism and racial capitalism with care and razor-sharp clarity, Simpson and Maynard point readers to portals for different futures through the infinite possibilities of Black-Indigenous resistance.”
—Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
“Simpson and 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
“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
“The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Rehearsals for Living is an intellectually fierce dialogue about our colonial present … In a time of incredible uncertainty, Simpson and 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
“The end of the world, or the end of capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy? This astonishing work of literature and theory enables us to imagine the end of them all, and to call into being, to rehearse, a world anew.”
—John Munro, author of The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960
“Captures that urgent project of what it means to be human and imagine freedom in times of terrible danger. Maynard and Simpson tap into Black and Indigenous ways of knowing and world-making that require a fundamental disordering of the forces of destruction and the re-ordering of life and the beautiful struggle to get free.”
—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
“Using the age-old practice of letter-writing and the land itself as a palimpsest, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson find common ground to challenge the moral legitimacy of the settler nation state, and reinscribe new ways of what it means to be beings who are human in the forensic landscapes of Canada … Rehearsals for Living is fundamental to understanding the interlocking, founding crimes of the Americas; necessary for remembering the many erased histories of the ongoing struggle for justice; and altogether indispensable to those wanting to create possible solutions.”
—M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!