Swamp Capitalism: Environmental Racism in South Louisiana Landscapes

Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” is a corridor along the Mississippi River lined with oil refineries and plastic manufacturing plants on the sites of former plantations. Startling images of toxic smokestacks rising over sugarcane fields and towns founded by descendants of enslaved African and African American people have come to symbolize environmental racism in its most extreme form. This presentation travels through racial, economic, and ecological layers of Louisiana’s sugar plantations, oil fields, salt mines, and wetlands over the course of millennia. Using archives, oral histories, earth sciences, and mixed media artmaking, Swamp Capitalism excavates new dimensions of environmental racism and introduces a larger vision for environmental justice.

THIS EVENT IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC