Toward a geography of black internationalism: Bayard Rustin, nonviolence and the promise of Africa

This article charts the trip made by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin to West Africa in 1952, and examines the unpublished ‘Africa Program’ which he subsequently presented to leading American pacifists. I situate Rustin’s writings within the burgeoning literature on black internationalism which, despite its clear geographical registers, geographers themselves have as yet made only a modest contribution towards. The article argues that within this literature there remains a tendency to romanticize cross-cultural connections in lieu of critically interrogating their basic, and often competing, claims. I argue that closer attention to the geographies of black internationalism, however, allows us to shape a more diverse and practiced sense of internationalist encounter and exchange. The article reconstructs the multiplicity of Rustin’s black internationalist geographies which drew eclectically from a range of Pan-African, American and pacifist traditions. Though each of these was profoundly racialized, they conceptualized race in distinctive ways and thereby had differing understandings of what constituted the international as a geographical arena. By blending these forms of internationalism Rustin was able to promote a particular model of civil rights which was characteristically internationalist in outlook, nonviolent in principle and institutional in composition; a model which in selective and uneven ways continues to shape our understanding of the period

Human resilience and resettlement among the Islands of Four Mountains, Aleutians, Alaska

Combined archaeological, ecological, and geologic research on Chuginadak and Carlisle Islands in the Islands of Four Mountains (IFM) probed questions about the sustainability of human settlements over the past 4000 years in the face of geologic, ecological, and social hazards.We use a human ecodynamics approach to frame the investigation and present original archaeological evidence from this poorly known region of the remote Aleutian Islands. Several village sites occupied during the last four millennia are clustered in locations that were not damaged by earthquake-induced tsunamis; however, new geologic evidence indicates that at least one volcanic eruption forced humans to abandon one or more prehistoric village sites. Combined archaeological, ecological, and geologic analyses demonstrate resilient Unangax̂ occupations of the IFM through long-term climate change as well as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions with occasional community vulnerability to volcanic eruptions

Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling: New Tools for Reconstructing the Geography and Ecology of Past Human Populations

International audiencePrehistoric human populations were influenced by climate change and resulting environmental variability and developed a wide variety of cultural mechanisms to deal with these conditions. In an effort to understand the inesfluence of environmental factors on prehistoric social and technical systems, there is a need to establish methods with which to model and evaluate the rules and driving forces behind these human-environment interactions. We describe a new set of analytical tools―an approach termed Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling (ECNM)―that can be used to address these issues and to test current hypotheses. This approach's modeling architectures are used to reconstruct past human systems in the Old and New Worlds, past natural systems within which they operated― namely geological, paleobiological and paleoenvironmental conditions―and also to develop informed hypotheses concerning the geographic spread, migration, and eco-cultural adaptations of prehistoric human populations. The ECNM approach has recently been developed and explored at two National Science Foundation- and European Science Foundation-funded workshops. We describe the goals and methods of ECNM, the results of the proof-of-concept projects, the analytical issues that remain unresolved, and the potential this approach has to offer the disciplines of paleoanthropology and archaeology