Jan 23, 2025

Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

Greg Childs

Hosted by Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

Summary

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

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Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world. Recall This Book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University and John Plotz, Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative.

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