50 Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy; or, Why Words Matter

Recall This Book

Continuing our conversation on the events at the Capitol and the end of the Trump era, 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 forthcoming from Cambridge. His 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: 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:

50 Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy; or, Why Words Matter

Upcoming episodes:

At long last, the promised 3rd Recall This Buck is here. And with it the world’s most famous economic historian, direct from Paris, France. JP and Adaner Usmani (star of Episode 44) are joined by Thomas Piketty, who discusses his new Capital and Ideology–as brilliant as it is long! They tackle the rising tide of 21st century inequality, and the failure of the bumbling “Brahmin Left” to defeat plutocracy and ethno-nationalism.