J. T. Roane, "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place" (NYU Press, 2023)

New Books in African American Studies · Jun 4, 2023 · 1h 6m

In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), 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…