Biography

J.T. Roane is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State 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. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU's Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane's scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History and, Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame.

Crossroads Arts Fellow Project

Plot

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.