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Interchange – Writing Red: Joshua Clover on Strikes and Riots

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It’s May 5th, 2020 and today we’re going to bring our interview with Joshua Clover on poetry and crisis, strikes and riots, back to your attention. This conversation took place at the end of September in 2015 when Clover was completing his Verso book Riot. Strike. Riot that would be published in May of 2016.

What recalled this conversation to us was an April 16 podcast we came across called The Geopolitics of COVID-19 and hosted by the University of California at Davis Humanities Institute. It features Clover in conversation with the great Mike Davis whose back-to-back books The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005) and Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006) really ought to be required reading at this point in capitalism’s late phase of pandemic generation.

Near the end of the conversation Clover addresses the Rent Strike that happened in April and this ties in nicely with the focus of this Interchange. We’ll begin with that slightly edited clip. (The link to the whole conversation is below.)

The work of Joshua Clover blends the worlds of poetry and economic crisis.

Clover’s book Riot. Strike. Riot explores the historical development of riots from a tactic for worker’s wage demands to post-1968 occupations challenging corporate and government malignance.

In our first segment Clover gives an overview of his work of political theory and tells us why we’re in a “new age of riot.”

But we’ll begin with a poem from Red Epic to set the tone. This is “Haecceity” a latin word which loosely translates as “thisness” and which Clover expands to mean “a particular sensual immediacy of the given thing.”

GUEST
Joshua Clover is a poet, communist, cultural critic, translator, editor, and professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. He has published three acclaimed volumes of poetry including The Totality for Kids and his most recent, Red Epic, published by Commune Editions in 2015, and a book of political theory, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings published by Verso.

RELATED
Revolutionary Letters No. 19” Diane di Prima
DHI Conversation: The Geopolitics of COVID-19 with Mike Davis and Joshua Clover
The Year in Struggles by Joshua Clover

MUSIC
“Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” Handsome Furs
“Run This Town” Jay-Z (with Rhianna and Kanye West)
“White Riot” The Clash
“Paper Airplanes” MIA

Songs under Clover’s poems:
“Thisness” Miles Davis
“Transistor” Kraftwerk
“Duck-Rabbit” Alog

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assisted by Bella Bravo
Executive Producer: Kade Young

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