ANTI FEAR Assembly: Found poetry workshop centered around the Insurrection Act

The Insurrection Act of 1807 was arcane and little discussed until Donald Trump threatened to invoke it in response to uprisings in Minneapolis and other cities following Derek Chauvin's brutal killing of George Floyd. The Act allows the president to domestically deploy troops in order to suppress an "insurrection," "domestic violence," or "unlawful combination." However, as an "insurrection" is legally undefined, it has been left up to the executive to determine when it is appropriate to invoke the Act. As history has demonstrated, the Act has been used sparingly, but in any event either to suppress so-called race riots or enforce civil rights. During this workshop, we will discuss the Act in light of current events and its historical context, as well as participate in some exercises that will illuminate the "close reading" that legal interpretation requires---which will include inviting participants to use the text to create their own found poetry, propose their own definitions of "insurrection," as well as discuss how they would amend the Act as currently written.

Text of Insurrection Act: 

The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—

•(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

•(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.

During the workshop we played with amending the text as well as created ‘found text’ poems using the text of the act. Active discussion continued beyond the workshop and resulted in a zine titled “resurrection” which can be viewed below.

Instructions on creating found poems using text:

As usefully defined by the Academy of American Poets: "found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions."

ABOUT HOST

Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction and poetry. She is a lecturer at the New School, an essay editor at The Offing, and a 2020 columnist for Epiphany magazine's lit zine The Epiphanic. Her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Her book INSURRECTION, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She is also a lawyer and graduate of Columbia Law School.

On June 2, 2020 Hawa’s essay Insurrection in the Eye of the Beholder, On the little-known law that has shaped black history in the United States was published in The Baffler.

ABOUT HEKLER ASSEMBLY

HEKLER ASSEMBLY is a transnational space for art and cultural workers to share, discuss and collectively imagine new ways of instituting based on the principles of self-organizing, community care, critical thinking, political education, distribution of resources, and healing. With alternating hosts, we share practical, historical, and theoretical knowledge about collaborative, pedagogical, and governing models established in response to shifting regimes, colonial and neoliberal violence. We question and learn about radical hospitality and conviviality, eco-centered community organizing, instituting, and art practices that showcase the symptoms we need to transform. Most importantly we continue asking what can be the role of arts now and in the future. Assembly is envisioned as an open collaborative process that includes reading groups, conversations with practitioners, and the ANTI FEAR series. 

ANTI FEAR series are initiated in collaboration with New York-based artist and neurologist Sonja Blum. It is an evolving collective practice aiming in this time of crisis and change for a space decidedly between cultural/theoretical dialogue and therapeutic discourse. It is envisioned as a space in which we bring privately held fears into community with others' fears to embrace vulnerability and open collective experiments in community-building, trust, reciprocal care, and re-imagining the commons. This work is explored through poetry, movement/body work, breathing exercises and meditations, readings, lectures and other practices that untie repressive knots and make us feel empowered, imaginative and hopeful.