“The seeds of a different world are already alive in the everyday practices of ordinary Black and Indigenous people”: An interview with J.T. Roane

Abstract

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Beginning in Fall 2022, Roane will serve as Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in Africana Studies, Geography, and Global Racial Justice at the Institue for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research. In this interview with Megan Femi Cole, Preeti Nayak, and Eve Tuck, J.T. Roane examines the ways that the quotidian practices of Black ecologies and the tradition of Black feminist ecological writing and praxis alongside the work of Indigenous sovereignties serve as the basis for an alternative future beyond ecological catastrophe in the context of Turtle Island and with implications beyond. In his responses to the important questions posed in this special issue, Roane centers the alternative worldmaking embedded in Black feminist praxis and related traditions, considering them as the seeds for a generative future beyond the current horizons of future extraction and disposability. Roane’s contributions to thinking about this in the context of pedagogy and curriculum emerges from his own struggles to transform discussions about the environment through the framework offered by Black ecologies as a mode of thinking together the reality that gendered racial capitalism sequesters Black communities to zones of expendability and also that these same communities possess the cultural resources and political insights to create meaningful alternatives (Hosbey & Roane, 2021; Roane & Hosbey, 2019).

Keywords:

• Black ecologies
• neoliberalism
• urbicide
• ecocide
• Black feminist thought
• racial capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. T. Roane

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Beginning in Fall 2022, Roane will serve as Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor Africana Studies, Geography, and Global Racial Justice at the Institue for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He received his PhD 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.

Megan Femi-Cole

Megan Femi-Cole is a PHD student in Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto. Her research uses Black feminist thought to consider the relationships between transatlantic slavery and (post)colonial West African migrations to the Americas. More specifically, Femi-Cole wants to learn what black feminist thought reveals about departure and arrival as mobile configurations grounded in geographies of duress. She explores how these geographies though indexed to deprivation and death, also indicate the presence of more expansive, relational place making practices.

Preeti Nayak

Preeti Nayak is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research examines how racialized high school teachers and community educators across Southern Ontario engage youth on issues of climate justice. Broadly, she is interested in how educators enact local climate justice pedagogies that make sense of epistemic diversity and racial justice, in the context of the climate crisis.

Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. Tuck is the founding director of the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.