Rehearsals for Living (Abolitionist Papers Book 3)

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation. In your letters, you both declare yourselves as nerds and Star Trek fans. And this is a serious question: What does Star Trek bring to your thinking in your practices? What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book." Our team is working hard to bring you more independent, award-winning journalism. But Broadview is a nonprofit and these are tough times for magazines. Please consider supporting our work. There are a number of ways to do so:

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.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: For me, I think it's the most important part, because I think we can use that critique to inform what we do. Right now, I'm in the territory of Yellowknife and with a group of 16 Indigenous women living on the land. In a sense, it's a little microcosm and a way of coming together on the land to create a different world. Robyn Maynard: The title has so many different meanings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote the foreword for our book, describes abolition as "life in rehearsal." And that's really a way of thinking about the kind of world that we want to live in — about the kind of world that freedom could mean. I enjoyed both listening and reading this one. While listening, though I often stopped the audible to write my writing ideas - the writings of both Robin and Leanne are so beautiful that they inspired waves of ideas. Maynard and Simpson would probably say this is the wrong question. Simpson writes, “Our movements and mobilizations do not have the privilege of resting upon a fleeting emotion. The absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst.” Elsewhere, Maynard notes, “Even though I will dip my toes into cynicism now and again, I won’t let myself reside there.” They keep writing to one another, but also working: protesting, advocating, teaching, gardening. Maynard and Simpson, both mothers, ground their efforts in the very urgent need to create a survivable future for their children and communities.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.” A revolutionary collaboration about the world we’re living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. Well, Leanne is somebody who I had already had a deep respect for as an intellectual, and somebody who was becoming a friend. I really needed to reach out in the sense of what it means to be coming up against so many crises, to somebody who was very much a part of freedom-making traditions and comes from a history of work and thought in Indigenous radicalism. Rehearsals for Living is a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2022.

As an invocation for collective resistance, the book succeeds, but it’s also powerful when the authors share the small details of their lives – Simpson’s meditative nighttime runs with her daughter, Maynard effortfully tolerating the spider on her stairs – that ground their ethics in the reality of daily living. At times, their dialogue wades so deeply into critical theory that the epistolary structure is obscured. But when Maynard writes, “I miss you, Leanne,” in the midst of one didactic letter, it is a heart-rending jolt of intimacy. Betasamosake Simpson and Maynard spoke to Shelagh Rogers about the conversations that led to Rehearsals for Living. The pace is slow, and I had to take out the book from the library twice to make it through the whole thing. It's a bit like reading a calculus text book. Not enjoyable, lots of struggles, important lessons, you want to put it down but then you'll fail the class. The epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada. Additional writing appears in Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal and numerous book anthologies.

Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes different. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard envision a future shaped by freedom in Rehearsals for Living