Join Cindy Milstein (editor) and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo (contributing author) for the Montreal launch of “Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief” (AK Press, fall 2017), where they 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.

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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.

Kevin Yuen Kit Lo is a graphic designer, community organiser, and educator based in Montreal. He runs the design studio LOKI, working at the intersection of graphic design and social change. His text in the collection addresses childhood sexual abuse and its refractions on his life as an activist.