Session 2: Secession Made in the USA
Session 2: Secession Made in the USA 6:30pm drinks, 7pm event With members of the Cascadia independence movement and Joshua Clover, professor of English at UC Davis. Donetsk, Kurdistan, Abkhazia, Kosovo . . . Separatism is usually portrayed as a troublesome yet distant question of foreign affairs, but the issue of secession also has a deep-rooted, homegrown, American tradition. From Aaron Burr to the Confederate states to black separatist movements, many have questioned the integrity of the American Federation in speech and in deeds. For this second session, we invite representatives from the Cascadia independence movement to make their case for secession, while poet Joshua Clover will argue for a complete reframing of the question of Secession Made in USA in the age of globalization. Follows a screening of Eric Baudelaire’s 2014 film Letters to Max at 4:45 p.m. Joshua Clover is the author of two books of poetry and two of cultural history and theory: The Matrix (British Film Institute , 2005) and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (University of California , 2009). His new book of poetry, Red Epic , is forthcoming from Commune Editions (spring 2015) and a book on the political economy of struggle, Of Riot, will be published by Verso in spring 2016. His column “Pop & Circumstance” appears monthly in The Nation . He has won yearlong fellowships from the N ational Endowment for the Arts , the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities. He is a professor of English at the University of California , Davis; in spring , he will convene a Residential Research Group on culture and finance capital at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Cascadia is a slowly emerging independence movement. It has been listed at number seven on Time magazine’s top ten most likely to succeed (at seceding) independence movements, along with Tibet, Scotland, and Catalonia, as well as listed as Vice ’s personal favorite independence movement. With a combined population of fifty-two million and a GDP of $2.5 trillion, Alaska, British Columbia, California, Oregon, and Washington are poised to emerge as a megaregion and global economic powerhouse driven by innovation, energy, geographic location, and sustainable resource management, attracting new jobs and investment while enhancing an already unparalleled quality of life.