On Insurrections

Abstract

O n January 6, 2021, many learned themeaning of theword insurrection for the first time. When a violent mob stormed the US Capitol, captured on live television, words did not come easy. Insurrection sounds so antiquated, so out of the realm of possibility! Yet in front of our eyes, individuals wielding weapons and dressed in tactical gear, homemade costumes, and “Make America Great Again” T-shirts overwhelmed police barriers and threatened lawmakers who were voting to certify Joe Biden’s victory as the forty-sixth president. Americans still do not agree on what they saw that day or what it means. Two articles exploring literature of liberation point toward the long history of insurrection as a pathway to freedom, albeit pursued by those in different positions from the January 6 rioters. These two articles, “‘The Fate of St. DomingoAwaits You’: RobertWedderburn’sUnfinishedRevolution,” by Shelby Johnson, and “PhillisWheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the AtlanticWorld,” by Betsy Erkkila, bring to light similar ways that Wedderburn and Wheatley unsettle tyrannical racial hierarchies in their writing, portending through imaginative and literal political resistance an assured liberation.1 Bringing these articles into conversation with an episode of the Why Is This Happening? podcast featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates and ChrisHayes, recorded a day after the January 6 attack, can help disentangle differing notions of freedom that drive these case studies of insurrection and make us more aware of the practice of liberation as ongoing.2 On January 6 the “freedom” that insurrectionists championedwas not articulated clearly, but the attackers weremotivated by a general unwillingness to accept a futuristic America: a pluralistic, progressive democracy with the broad participation of diverse peoples (peoples who are often the targets of Donald Trump’s ire). While the attack was certainly planned, it wasnot well organized;many who gatheredwerewithout a clear purpose aside from disrupting the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden. Wedderburn’s and Wheatley’s embrace of insurrection, on the other hand, is driven by commitment to freedom unbound by systems (economic, political, national) that hinge on racial hierarchies (slavery most egregiously). For Wedderburn and Wheatley, liberation is not about who leads in a particular historical moment but about who is empowered in a transformative future. In their conversation, Coates and Hayes are earnest in their assertion that what happened on January 6 is not as unprecedented as it may seem; America is a