From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire

Join Haymarket Books and In These Times for a book talk on From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, with author Sarah Jaffe. This event will take place at Haymarket House, and will also be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change. We are in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. What can we do?

This is capitalism's death phase, and this crushing daily reality its violent, thrashing excrescence. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for most of the world’s population. The marginalized and the vulnerable have been feeling the weight of this crisis for a long time, but it is increasingly pressing down on all of us. And yet we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed.

At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. In her new book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, veteran labor journalist Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. In it, she argues that when we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

What could this collective mourning look like? How do we slow down and grieve when everything about the world lashes at our backs and demands we move on? For this launch event, Jaffe will discuss all of this and more.

For this launch event, Sarah Jaffe will be in conversation with Dania Rajendra

Order a copy of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire:

https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978154170...

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on September 10, 2024.***

Speakers:

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center Fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. She is the author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and many other publications. She is the cohost, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

Dania Rajendra has been organizing, strategizing, and writing to knit people together across boundaries, silos, disciplines, and communities for two decades. Currently, she sits on the international advisory board of the Diaspora Alliance and the board of Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers (GLOW).

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEqThV9qCck

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org