J.T. Roane will draw on a recently published essay that is an effort to recover histories of Black critiques of the twinned forces of displacement and extractionism in relation to the Jim Crow enclosure of the Tidewater region represented by the consolidation of commercial fisheries after 1880. Braiding Black cultural history, labor history, and environmental history, under the formulation of “Black Ecologies,” Roane show the ways rural Black communities' relationships with the water and the subaquatic species like fish, crabs, oysters, and clams, in practice and in expressive culture, evolved through the period of the industrialization, deindustrialization, and recent reindustrialization of the Tidewater's waterways after Reconstruction. Using county level records, local Black expressive culture, governmental studies, historical newspaper articles, and recorded oral histories, Roane charts the transformation of Black rural relationships with the area's waterscape—a conceptualization combining the geological features and processes of the water-land ecotone as well as the overlapping spaces of labor and leisure that created competing demands and a dialectic shaping rural life. Roane will close by discussing briefly a new project related to rural Black Baptist congregations and their cultivation of an ecclesiastical and scholastic geography associated with their distinctive vision for regional development after Emancipation.
J.T. Roane 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. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, ecologies, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. Roane's first book, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place is forthcoming in January 2023 from New York University Press.