Award winning poet Joshua Clover theorises the riot as the form of the coming insurrection
Joshua Clover is a professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. A widely published essayist, poet, and cultural theorist, his most recent books are Red Epic and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About.
Riot, in this absolutely necessary book, is considered as
differential procedure and rigorous improvisational method, as
essential repertoire on the way from general malaise to general
strike. But then this conception folds tightly yet disorderly into
a new and open set of questions. It's not that the raging, ragged
entrance to the new golden age is the new golden age. It's not that
theory can't bear a riot. It's just that riot makes new ways of
seeing what theory can and can't do and imposes upon us a kind of
knowledge of our own embarrassing and already given resources of
enjoyment. Joshua Clover says riot deserves a proper theory but
here-sly, stone cold-he gives us more than that. Now we have some
guidelines for the new and ongoing impropriety that fleshes forth
and fleshes out our optimal condition.
*Fred Moten, scholar, activist, poet and author of In the Break:
The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study*
In its sweep, rigor, and elegance, Riot. Strike. Riot. is
pleasurable and provocative, worthy of the urgent debates it should
inspire.
*Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the
Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of
America*
Riot. Strike. Riot. is the crystalline analysis of this fraught
moment-between communism and anarchism, between street protest and
economic strike. Clover's text is clear without being simple,
contemporary yet historical, and affectionate without being
mawkish-much like a riot, in fact, it opens up the future while
remembering that the past is comprised of little other than
exploitation, exclusion and the kinds of violence that deliberately
are attributed to the very people who suffer most from it.
*Nina Power, senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University
and author of One-Dimensional Woman*
One of the liveliest, sharpest, and erudite cultural theorists in
the US.
*The Stranger*
Frisky, audacious . Riot. Strike. Riot screams across the sky of
our electoral theater.
*Chicago Tribune*
[Riot. Strike. Riot] thrills. It elucidates and, in a way,
valorizes a taboo fixture of the political arena in an era of
seemingly perpetual economic crisis and withering patience for mere
reform.
*East Bay Express*
Phenomenal...The genius of Riot. Strike. Riot lies in its concise
and historically confident analysis of riots.
*Public Books*
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