Biography
J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in Global Racial Justice in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. His book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place was published in 2023 with New York University Press. Roane's short experimental film Plot received support from Princeton's Crossroads Fellowship. He also currently serves as a member of Just Harvest—Tidewater, an Indigenous and Black led organization building toward food sovereignty and justice in Virginia’s historical plantation region through political and practical education.
Crossroads Arts Fellow Project
This film project considers through palimpsestic layering of visual work and sound inspired by such artists as Kahlil Joseph, Temar France, Viktor le. Givens, Claudrena Harold and Kevin Everson the cultivation and ongoing practice of Black burial grounds as part of an insurgent social and cultural terrain in rural Tidewater Virginia. “Plot” integrates memory, place, haunting, nostalgia, vitality, and death, to bring into focus--if not full transparency-- histories of rural Black spiritual practice and placemaking.