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In 2024, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African‐American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina, celebrates its 50th anniversary. Founded as the as the Afro‐American Cultural and Service Center in 1974 by Mary Harper and Bertha Maxwell‐Roddey at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, this case study reflects on the Gantt Center's evolution from a community‐based cultural space to a full‐fledged arts and cultural institution in uptown Charlotte. It focuses on the opportunities and challenges this Black‐centered and Black‐led institution has faced over the past half century as it has evolved from a grassroots cultural organization to a hybrid fine arts, education, and cultural institution, negotiating the needs of a growing array of funders, leadership, artists, culture keepers, and audiences. Integrating historical material, interviews with past and current Gantt Center staff, and ethnographic observation, this case study describes how this historic institution honors its deep roots as an organization serving to Charlotte's Black community as it grows into a national and international center of Black arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines ecological restoration as a possible transformative and reparative practice amid ongoing colonial racial capitalist environmental destruction. While restoration--traditionally focused on repairing damaged landscapes--has increasingly recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledges, community engagement, and environmental justice, this article brings together critiques of normative restoration and critical discussions on reparations to locate environmental restoration within a broader ecology of reparations, or repair, for colonial violence that has disproportionately hurt Indigenous and Black communities. We consider how ideas and activities focused on "reparation ecology" offer new terrain upon which to foreground the interconnectedness of ecological and social repair through land rights, relationality, epistemic diversity, and solidarity. Drawing on case studies across geographies, we highlight how ecological restoration is at a crossroads for either internalizing or confronting injustices perpetrated through colonization and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how to rethink ecological restoration as a process tethered to ongoing formulations of racial and environmental justice. It is situated in the context of coastal Louisiana's wetland loss crisis and the state's unprecedented investment in large-scale wetland restoration projects as a technoscientific fix that comes at the expense of several small, Black and Indigenous bayou communities. Critical of approaching restoration as a practice predicated on loss and return, this article builds upon scholarship in Black and Indigenous ecologies and ethnographic fieldwork among Black coastal communities in southeast Louisiana to reimagine restoration as an intergenerational, socioecological set of practices grounded in cultivating cultural continuity and community care across time and space. Working with the Black feminist geographic concepts of the plot and the shoal, the article develops the notion alternative restorations—or restoration otherwise—around three reformulations of restoration: As a practice of cultural continuity, as a mode of cultivating self-reliance, and as a scientific practice of integrity and humility. It concludes by reflecting the ways Black ecological practices and values can shift the course of restoration science toward sustaining Black life in the era of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a small, yet growing body of scholarship focused on the political ecology of race and critical race studies of science and technology, this article follows the ways sediment, science, and race intersect on the grounds of environmental restoration in coastal Louisiana. Mobilizing ethnographic field work and historical research conducted with African-American communities and coastal scientists, I empirically expand upon geographer Kathryn Yusoff's (2018) notion of the "geosocial registers" of the Anthropocene through an examination of the entwined histories of coastal engineering and racial inequality that situate contemporary debates about large scale coastal restoration projects along Louisiana's disappearing coastline. In dialogue with critical work on the relationship between racism, science, and the constitution of the Anthropocene, I argue that coastal restoration is a geophysical and social process upon which racial inequality is forged and contested. The article concludes by considering how environmental restoration can participate in creating alternative forms of social and environmental repair by aligning the goals of coastal science with those of racial justice for communities of color living in changing coastal landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the film "El Olvido" directed by Heddy Honigmann.