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WINNER, 2024 Pauli Murray Book Prize, given by the African American Intellectual History Society
Finalist, 2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize, given by The UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes
A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power
In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city’s social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.
Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city’s underground—its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city’s set apart—its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.
— Ashley Farmer, author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era
"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."
— Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
"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."
— Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies, Columbia University
"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."
— Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Roane elevates the ecstatic worldmaking practices of those who refused the terms of liberal inclusion into a country cohered by violent dispossession, slavery, and spatial marginality.... The plotting done from within dark agoras offers critical lessons for a more holistic understanding of Black urban history, and readers in history, urban planning, anthropology, and sociology will be greatly informed by Roane’s lyrical offering."
"Dark Agoras is a rigorous, theoretically rich, and harrowing history of insurgent, queer Black social life in the face of violence, extraction, and enclosure in twentieth-century Philadelphia. Roane masterfully historicizes the shape-shifting capacities of dark agoras, weaving together primary source materials with generous engagement with secondary sources from the fields of Black studies, queer studies, Black geographies, and urban environmental histories."
"An invitation and a portal to the worlds of our country cousins, aunties, and uncles who went north and took more of us with them than perhaps we could discern looking straight at the big city. But when we queer our witness with Roane’s viewfinder, it becomes clear that our rural ancestors’ insurgent raucousness, its multifrequency divinity, its radical assemblage, sustains urban America."