Description:

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy concludes the fall 2024 book series with a discussion of Tariq Khan’s The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press). The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean examines the linkages between America’s colonizing wars and anticommunist repression. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Charting the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.”

Khan is a lecturer in psychology at Yale. Trained as an interdisciplinary historian, he has wide-ranging research, writing, and teaching experience in the fields of global capitalism, psychology, ethnicity and race studies, gender studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, labor & working-class history, and radical social movements. Khan will be in conversation with Arne Westad, director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs.