Professor Watchlist

J.T. Roane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. Roane’s faculty profile shows him on leave for the 2023-2024 academic year. His research interests include “black geographies,” “black ecologies,” “black gender and sexuality studies” and “African American and African Diaspora History.” Roane is also listed as a Faculty Fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center.

In June 2023, Boston Review interviewed Roane about his book “Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place” in which he “investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods.”

Roane introduced the book by stating:

“Dark agoras emerged under slavery through the active reinvention of African socialities and consciousnesses about place, identity, kinship, and belonging as the negation of the spatial and temporal features associated with domination and slave mastery…”

He goes on to state:

“Connections within the sites constituting dark agoras, as well as encounters across them and movement between them, underwrote a distinctive black working-class phenomenology of the city, the basis of what I term black queer urbanism…Black queer urbanism refers to a critical approach that views nonnormative forms of black social-geographic life…”

During the Boston Review interview, Roane responded to the question: “In your book, you argue that the stoop stands as one of the places that constitute the underground. How does this domestic exterior transform into a vital place for sociality?” Roane said:

“The stoop has a whole genealogy. The black uses of the stoop emerge out of the uses of the quarters in the context of the plantation…that was integrally related to their geographic position to the side of the major formation of the plantation—the big house—and to the spaces of labor, the field…

“When black communities get displaced during the Jim Crow enclosures…they don’t just relinquish those values.”

Roane was also featured in Campus Reform after participating in the panel discussion “Black Queer Religions Afro-Indigenous & New Religions.” Among the topics covered, panelists discussed “the reality of non-binary vaginas and biologically femme penises.”

Roane is an outspoken supporter of Palestine. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, he signed an open letter defending pro-Hamas rallies at Harvard University. The letter states, 

“The case of Harvard University is only one of many examples of the attacks that those who express solidarity with the Palestinians struggle face; attacks that are rapidly escalating at this time. Likewise, violent hate crimes against Palestinians are taking place around the country.”

Roane posted on X, formerly known as Twitter—

The ongoing bombardment of Gaza is genocidal and ecocidal. The relentless ethnic clearing is going along with stuff like bombing fisheries. This will not strictly be contained to one place/ one people. The logics will spread as will their effects. Ceasefire Now!

— J.T. Roane (@JTRoane) November 7, 2023

Please send information on J.T. Roane to Watchlists@tpusa.com

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Published – November 9, 2023