We at India Däck are very pleased to host Cindy Milstein (editor) of
"Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief" (AK Press, fall
2017).
Cindy will share reflections on the relation between
structural losses, mourning, and resistance. This collection, as Silvia
Federici, author of "Caliban and the Witch," puts it, "uncovers the
destruction of life that capitalist development leaves in its trail. But
it is also witness to the power of grief as a catalyst to collective
resistance."
Via first-person and/or frontline stories, the
anthology's thirty-seven contributors illuminate, bittersweetly, that we
can bear almost anything when it is worked through collectively. Grief
is generally thought of as something
personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we
lessen the power of the forces that debilitate us, while at the same
time building the humane social practices that reduce suffering and
accentuate quality of life for everyone. Addressing tragedies from
Fukushima to Palestine, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border
crossings, and racism to rape, the intimate yet tenacious writing in
this volume shows that mourning can pry open spaces of contestation and
reconstruction, empathy, and solidarity.
Copies of the book Rebellious Mourning will be for sale at the event.
—
Cindy Milstein is the author of "Anarchism and Its Aspirations,"
coauthor "Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday
Anarchism," and editor of the anthologies "Taking Sides: Revolutionary
Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism" and "Rebellious Mourning: The
Collective Work of Grief" as well as the Lexicon series pamphlets. Long
engaged in anarchistic organizing, social movements, and collective
spaces, Cindy was death doula for three parents over the past four
years. Currently, Cindy organizes with a collective around the general
theme of "care not cops" and is on the core collective of the Institute
for Advanced Troublemaking, an anarchist summer school in Worcester, MA.
India Däck
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