Blaut, James (1927–2000)

James M. “Jim” Blaut was a teacher, researcher, and political activist, whose work powerfully shaped geographers’ understandings of several topics, particularly colonialism and Eurocentrism as well as the spatial cognition of children.

Blaut was born in New York City and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. He did postgraduate work at the Imperial School of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad and subsequently completed his PhD in geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University under the cultural geographer Fred Kniffen, with a dissertation on the microgeography of one acre in Singapore. Blaut went on to teach at Yale and Cornell and was director of the Caribbean Research Institute at the College of the Virgin Islands and a consultant to the government of Venezuela.

Blaut arrived at Clark University in 1966. There, he began the extraordinarily multifaceted second phase of his career, during which he straddled geography, anthropology, psychology, and other fields, combining activism with academic research on imperialism, social justice, and early-childhood learning (the last stemming in part from his experience as a pilot and resulting in the later Place Perception Research Reports). He was one of the founders of Antipode, the first major journal of radical geography, and along with his wife and daughter, America and Gini Blaut Sorrentini, was active in Puerto Rican social, cultural, and political movements, both on the Island and in the Chicago area. He also participated in experiments in alternative education such as the “Miniversity,” founded in Massachusetts in 1971.

After becoming a “Clark legend” during the tumultuous late 1960s, Blaut moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971, where his critiques of environmental determinism, colonialism, and imperialism flowered in many articles and his books, The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism in 1987 and Fourteen Ninety-Two: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History in 1992. In the mid 1990s, he resumed his critical evaluation of conventional wisdom regarding children's early development of spatial cognition, under grants from the National Science Foundation.

It was in Chicago, too, that Blaut became known as a supporter of the downtrodden, associated with student movements of ethnic minorities: Latinos, African Americans, and Palestinians among others. While continuing to work on map learning in very young children, resulting in seminal articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Blaut began writing a series of three books that became the capstone of his career. The Colonizer's Model of the World appeared in 1991 and Eight Eurocentric Historians in 2000. He was at work on the third volume in the series, titled Decolonizing the Past, at the time of his death in 2000.

Blaut received several honors throughout his career, including Distinguished Scholar of the Year in 1997 from the Association of American Geographers and Distinguished Professor from the Latino student organizations and Rafael Cintron Ortiz Latino Cultural Center of the University of Illinois. James Blaut will be remembered as [Page 286]one of geography's most outspoken iconoclasts and one of its most colorful characters.

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