“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

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).