Policing Black Lives - Montreal Book Launch

Join Robyn Maynard and friends for the launch of the expanded and revised edition of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.

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 colonial dispossession, 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.

Panelists

Robyn Maynard is an author and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.

Marie-Célie Agnant is a poet, writer, translater, and performer. Her work, since her breakthrough novel La Dot de Sara (1995), explores themes of solitude, racism, alterity, and exile.

Marlihan Lopez is an Afro-Caribbean feminist memory worker and community organizer committed to unearthing, preserving, and honouring the cultural and epistemic productions Black women and gender-expansive people.

Belen Blizzard is an artist, poet and community organizer living and working in Tiotha:ke, Montreal. They hold a BA in Women’s Studies from Concordia University. Their work engages with Afropessimism, queer of color critique, performance and abolitionist thought.