You are invited to an event, co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and English at AUP, the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at AUP, and the ‘Politics of Translation’ Seminar (AUP, U Kent Paris, and the University of London Institute in Paris)
Joshua Clover (UC Davis), ‘Emeute/Grève: The Language of Riot’
Thursday 15 September, 18:30-20:30, in Combes C104
while strike and riot are often set in opposition, the return of the riot can only be understood in its historical entanglement with the strike; we’ll start with the words, and end with some doubts about the role of language in struggle and the limits of “reading the riot act.”
Refreshments will be served. External guests are very welcome, but they must contact Geoff Gilbert in advance (ggilbert
aup.edu) to have their names included on the guest list, and should expect to have their ID checked at the door.
Joshua Clover is Professor at University of California at Davis. He is the author of the recent Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016), the argument of which his presentation at AUP will address. He is a great critic of contemporary music and film (he has written very regularly for The Nation, and wrote a brilliant tweet-based very short novel about resigning from Spin), as instanced in an extraordinary work of historical materialist music criticism, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have this to Sing about (U California Press, 2009) and The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2005), and has made a range of key recent interventions in Marxist theory and practice. His poetry is amazing too – his most recent book is Red Epic (Commune Press, 2015), and his earlier books of poems, Madonna Anno Domini (1998) and The Totality for Kids (2006) were widely praised and prized. He is also editor, with Jasper Bernes and Juliana Spahr, of Commune Editions, which publishes ‘poetry and other antagonisms’