Towards an Environmental History of Racial Capitalism in St. Louis

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He will discuss his second book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley (2013).  Retaining a focus on the immediate experience of slavery and mastery, River of Dark Dreams embeds the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism  and U.S. imperialism.

Johnson’s first book, Soul by Soul (1999) used the slave market as a way to think about the fantasies, fears, negotiations, and violence that characterized American slavery. He is currently writing a book about the 1841 revolt aboard the slave ship Creole.

This event is organized by the Departments of Africana Studies and Geosciences as part of the Afro-Diasporic Environmentalism Series: Explorations of environmental racism and justice.