This is an engaging and readable critique of urban planning, racialization, and class-based oppressions. Accessible to a wide range of readers, from undergraduates to the thoughtful public, Roane offers a fresh and inspiring celebration of Black urbanism and world-making.
Dark Agoras is a powerful and compelling work that shines a great deal of light on the deeply intertwined nature of Black migration, placemaking, and resistance. Roane’s book is a serious and lyrical contribution to an ongoing discourse.
Dark Agoras takes what we think we know, grounding this in a keen analysis of Philadelphia (PA) and territories of rural enslavement, and turns it on its head. It is a bracing intellectual exercise to read this book and then to ponder its profound implications for our commonly held but limited understanding of Black urban life.
Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity:
Dark Agoras is both a theory of Black plotting and an insurgent plot in its own right. Marked by theoretical boldness and prodigious archival research, J. T. Roane has produced a work that reflects the depth of possibility in Black study. Roane elucidates histories and landscapes of Black queer urbanism with rigor, creativity, and political acuteness. For readers invested in abolition, gender, sexuality, racial capitalism, and Black living otherwise, Dark Agoras is a capacious, incisive, and indispensable text.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies, Columbia University:
Roane models a new and potentially transformative scholarly practice, one that builds upon and extends the work of earlier theorists, sociologists, historians, and others to give name and meaning to the spatial and social formations Black peoples created and sustained in late-nineteenth and twentieth century settings (especially the Chesapeake region and the city of Philadelphia). Dark Agoras is the work of a critically brilliant and creative thinker and writer: one whose work is sure to provoke, instigate, and initiate new and exciting conversations, and in so doing help guide the direction of Black Studies scholarship for years to come.
Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation:
J. T. Roane brilliantly theorizes Black sociality, sensibility, and spirituality in historical conjuncture. Roane uses archival and critical resources beautifully, situating this work firmly in the Black studies tradition while simultaneously making exciting new interventions. Most of all, Dark Agoras is a stunning story of insurgent world making that will have a significant impact on the world of ideas.
Ashley Farmer, author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era:
Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, Dark Agoras fundamentally alters our understanding of Black Philadelphia. Documenting how Black migrants cultivated the spiritual, cultural, and social world around them, Roane reveals the city to be an epicenter of insurgent collectivity and unceasing defiance, challenging long held narratives about Black urbanity and pathology. Dark Agoras peels back the layers of the City of Brotherly Love to show how Black Philadelphians transgressed and transformed their social-spatial order from slavery to the present. It fundamentally reshapes how we should think about Black urban life, culture, and liberation.
