Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

New Books in Latin American Studies

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP.

Greg's historical and hemispheric perspective helped bring out the differences between calling an event “sedition,” “seditious conspiracy” and “insurrection,” the new “Lost Cause” that many of those attacking the Capitol seem to hold on to and the particularities of Whiteness in the United States, as compared to elsewhere in the Americas. Greg even proposes a new word for what happened January 6th, 2021: counterinsurgency.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Legitimation Crisis (1974), Jurgen Habermas
• On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt
• The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J. G. A. Pocock
• Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), Stephanie Camp
• Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1998), Charles Tilly
• The Possessive Investment of Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (orig. 1998) 20th anniversary edition, George Lipsitz

Listen and Read.

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