The MA Ecology, Culture & Society is delighted to invite you to a lecture by JT Roane (Rutgers).
Thursday 26th January 2023 | 4.30-6.30pm
Richard Hoggart Building (RHB) 356.
Goldsmiths, University of London
Free. All Welcome!
Plot: On Black Spatial Insurgency
In the context of slavery, various interrelated iterations of the plot—the site of the body’s interment, the garden parcel, a roving imaginary of the potential for connection in land and waterscapes outside of domination, and hidden insurrectionary activity—fostered a vision of de-commodified water and landscapes as well as resources among the enslaved. Evolving in dialectic with mastery and dominion especially as expressed in the social-spatial form of the plantation, enslaved and post-emancipation communities plotted a set of communal resources within the interstices of plantation ecologies, constituting the Black commons. The presentation examines the plot’s and the Black commons’ reorganization as living logics, as hybridized cultural praxes with capacity for incremental and radical transformation, translation, and translocation prompted by intracommunal dynamics and their expression in a dynamic relation with the forces that impinge upon Black placemaking from outside—extractionism, disposability, displacement, and death. Translated to the city in the context of the Great Migrations beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, this imaginary continued to underwrite a diverse array of visions for personal and collective urban social formations askew from the uneven terrain engendered by racial capitalism. In the rural context, the plot and the Black commons continued to evolve as a vision of an ecological otherwise, creating space of collectivity hedging the Jim Crow era enclosure. Finally, the plot served as the basis of radical thinker and writer June Jordan’s vision of terraforming “mississippi-america” through radical land reform and the abolition of property from the 1970s until her death in 2002.
JT Roane, author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU 2023), is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He is 2022-2023 Social Science Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is also at work on an experimental short film titled Plot with support from the Crossroads Project at Princeton University.