Tariq Khan, who received his History B.A. in 2011 and his M.A. in 2013, has just published a book, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression.
The book analyzes the relationship between America’s colonizing wars and anticommunism. The colonizing wars against Native Americans, Khan argues, created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. He shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The state, in other words, viewed radicals in much the same way as it had viewed anticolonial insurgents, and collaborated with capitalist elites to use much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.”
Khan’s book is based on dissertation research he conducted while pursuing his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Khan defended his dissertation in 2021. After a postdoctoral appointment at UIUC in community-based research and teaching, he is currently a Lecturer in the History of Psychology at Yale University. He has researched and taught on a broad range of topics, including global capitalism, U.S. history, psychology, ethnicity & race studies, gender studies, colonialism & postcolonialism, labor & working-class history, and public history. In addition to his book, he has published book chapters on Franz Fanon and on relations between transnational labor unions and South Asia.
September 19, 2023