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Riot Now: Square, Street, Commune

Author(s)
Joshua Clover

“Riot Now: Square, Street, Commune” is a chapter from political theorist Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016). Taking the classical Greek agora—a place of assembly and commerce—as a starting point, Clover suggests that it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the riots and occupations that emerged in recent decades either happened or began in modern squares. He speaks of how this emergence of rioters corresponded to “an underlying political-economic unity, a material reorganization of society, which provide[d] them a shared set of problems and a shared arena in which to confront them.”

Moving from the square to the street and then to the commune, Clover’s chapter shows the ways in which public grounds have been co-opted and used as a means of resistance: from the Oaxaca Commune of 2006 in Mexico to the Occupy movement of 2011 and to the 2014 St. Louis riots that emerged in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder by police. Shared here in the context of Usufructuaries of earth, a project co-convened by BAK with artist Marwa Arsanios, and as part of a federated structure of reading groups across different cities, “Riot Now” portrays a way of making use of public space to enact politics as they could be: out in the open and imbued with riotous energy.

This chapter is one of the readings for the Berlin reading group—convened by Joud Al-Tamimi and Lama El-Khatib, titled On Value-Disrupting Activity, hosted by Hopscotch reading room on 5 May 2024, which explores the political and theoretical stakes of value as it links to violences enacted on and through land and property in Palestine and elsewhere.

Download PDF: “Riot Now: Square, Street, Commune”

Chapter 9 from Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot The New Era of Uprisings (2016).


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