J.T. Roane

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.

Title and abstract:

“Plot”

“Plot” is an experimental short film that uses visual and sonic palimpsest to draw out the myriad meanings and uses of historic rural Black church yards in the expression of intra and interregional familial and collective identities. Inspired by the loss of the physical structure of my home church, St. Johns Baptist in Desha, Virginia, during a 2015 tornado, as well as by the ongoing “return” pilgrimages to this space my family traces to mourn and to affirm fundamental forms of collectivity, the film draws together dance and as well as scenes of collective mourning to artistically render the entanglement of Black religious experience, secular sociality, and interregional Black placemaking. The use of layering of visuals and music asks the viewer to be immersed, to linger in the past and the present of these sites, to be haunted by them.

The film is my first attempt at an article theorizing Black church yards as materializations of the Black commons--as sites where post-emancipation communities, especially after the 1890s in the context of Jim Crow's consolidation, extended notions of value and values that ran anathema to gendered racial capitalist enclosure. The paper will consider the myriad uses of the church yard as a site of mourning, spiritual encounter, collective ownership and stewardship, feasting, as well as more secular activities entangling rural drinking cultures and illicit sexual geographies with otherwise sanctified territory.

This accounting challenges the primacy of the sanctuary as the dominant architectural feature of rural Black religious communities, attending to the stewardship of the church grounds. This shift in focus helps to elucidate the complexity of bottom-up aspirations for place and pastoral charisma in rural Black religious communities. This is not a romantic account suggesting rural Black religious communities go unmarred by hierarchies of gender and class, my preliminary argument is that the church ground as a site of provision, reciprocity, and futurity requires more nuanced interpretations of rural collectivity and religiosity.

This work will also consider the sites extending the ethos of the rural Black church yard through locally sponsored schools such as the Rappahannock Industrial Academy that served Black rural communities under segregation and which had active alumni associations shaping Black social worlds in Baltimore, Philadelphia , and beyond. Theorizing the Black commons through the grounds of the rural church yard, not only as a stable place but as a series of spatial relations across dislocation, challenges tidy distinctions often embedded in the commons discourse between rurality and the urban. I locate the commons itself in a set of embodied practices, rituals, and ethical commitments to shared abundance, not in a stable place (though there is sometimes stability) or in a recourse to the settler state's legitimacy in ensuring abstract collective ownership. The Black commons here is expressed through the worldmaking of communities historically excluded or often included as the expendable raw material underwriting the juridical consolidation of "the people's property."