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The author responds to commentaries offered as part of a 2002 panel debate on her book, Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity (2000) & offers reasons why she went beyond analyzing representations of communism in the Reader's Digest to a more in-depth exploration of its social role in shaping US national identity. The "intellectual arrogance" surrounding this periodical is decried, & its function as an institution of power & knowledge is explained. Critics' concerns are addressed & questions are raised about the "ethics" of critical geopolitics. K. Hyatt Stewart

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopoli- tics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.