Policing Black Lives, Revised and Expanded Edition
State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd
Published:15th Oct '25
£24.95
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
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.
The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.
“Robyn Maynard’s meticulously-researched and compelling analysis of state violence challenges prevailing narratives of Canadian multiculturalism and inclusion by examining how structures of racism and ideologies of gender are complexly anchored in global histories of colonization and slavery. This book should be read not only by those who have a specific interest in Canadian histories and social justice movements but by anyone interested in the abolitionist and revolutionary potential of the Black Lives Matters movement more broadly.”
-- Angela Y. Davis, author of Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture“We are so fortunate to have this new edition! Robyn Maynard’s clear, compelling book is a must read for organizations, households, and anyone who fights for social justice.”
-- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography“Impassioned, capacious, and insistently grounded in the legacies of Black activism, the revised and expanded edition of Policing Black Lives offers a sweeping analysis of state violence across historical periods, linking this phenomenon with impoverishment, surveillance, colonial dispossession, and the failures of educational institutions. Robyn Maynard remains an essential voice for our time, urging us “to build futures that sustain rather than destroy life” and “to build worlds in which all of us are free.”
-- David Chariandy, author of Brother“Timely, urgent, and cogent…brilliantly elucidates the grotesque anti-Black racist practices coming from the state, and other institutions imbued with power over Black people’s lives.”
-- Afua Cooper, Halifax’s seventh Poet Laureate and the author of Black Matters“Robyn Maynard offers powerful lessons for making anti-blackness in Canada legible to activists, scholars, policy makers, and community members committed to building a future nation—and world—free of racism, heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, and exploitation.”
-- Erik S. McDuffie, author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left FemiISBN: 9781773637631
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 13mm
Weight: 113g
474 pages
2nd Revised edition