The Department of Geography's 2018 Shaw Lecture will be delivered by Professor Nik Heynen from the University of Georgia.
Description from Dr. Heynen:
"At a prominent kitchen table on Sapelo Island, Georgia, I was once told that if Edward Teach’s treasure, rumored to be on Blackbeard Island just across a small tidal channel, was recovered it would prevent the remaining Saltwater Geechee community on Sapelo from further displacement and experiencing cultural genocide.
"Blackbeard’s treasure was in part generated by his engagement in the Transatlantic slave trade, which matters because Sapelo Island maintains the most in-tact remaining Gullah/Geechee community in the U.S., having been home to thirteen generations that directly tie their ancestry to first slaves brought there in 1802."
Heynen's presentation is about the pirates of racial capitalism and the persistent need for abolition ecology amidst their historical wake, reaching toward global implications to show how the last slave ship to illegally unload on U.S. shores did so on Jekyll Island in 1858, just south of Blackbeard and Sapelo Islands. This is the same island that in 1910 JP Morgan, who fashioned himself as a pirate, clandestinely organized a meeting that led to the formation of the U.S. Federal Reserve bank.
Heynen argues these events prefigured contemporary illicit tax havens used by JP Morgan Chase and that Jamie Dimon’s subsequent acts of global piracy impede abolition ecology. Just as Blackbeard’s treasure would facilitate securing land on Sapelo, the taxes on JP Morgan Chase’s (and other transnational corporations’) hidden booty would allow for abolitionist reparations as called for in the wake of the US Civil War across the U.S.
Friday, March 23, 2018 at 3:30pm
Pepper Center Broad Auditorium 636 W. Call St.
Free
Geography Department
644-1706
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