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Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017, 376 pp., $94.95 (hardcover), ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-5091-2; $34.95 (softcover), ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-5092-9; $34.95 (Ebook), ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-5090-5.
Development Drowned and Reborn (henceforth DD) is the product of several years’ work by the late political geographer and Black Studies scholar Clyde Woods. Completed and released posthumously by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido, DD marks the end of a long wait for students of Woods’s work, whose last published work(s) came in 2010 shortly before his premature passing. In DD, Woods invites the reader to continue the arc developed in his monumental work, Development Arrested (1998), which charted the violence of plantocratic rule and its many registers of opposition and refusal—a Blues epistemology as he termed it. DD punctuates this earlier work by extending its chronological reach to the post-Katrina moment. It is a work that, despite its historical breadth, has a remarkable level of detail to both human experiences and structural considerations. Woods has managed to achieve something remarkable with DD—a history from below and from above, at the same time.
DD is a book that is concerned with “the long duree of struggle” (p. xxii), and interrogates what Woods calls the “organized abandonment” of New Orleans beginning in the 1690s under French colonial rule. The book considers the various expressions of Bourbonism (a term used to describe Authoritarian rule in early modern France) in Louisiana (and New Orleans in particular), and the manner in which this Bourbonism has managed to reconstitute itself throughout numerous historical junctures. These include Jim Crow, The Great Depression, The Second World War, postwar Black Freedom struggles, the rise of neoliberalism, and late-capitalism. It is an encyclopedia of the many “traps” set by Bourbonism— economic, social, and political, which have interrupted struggles for racial and economic justice—and the creative resistance praxes that emerged as the result of a “Blues philosophy.” For Woods this “Blues philosophy” was a tripartite system that included: (1) social imperatives central to the spiritual songs; (2) a philosophy that informed the future Southern Freedom Movements; and (3) an ethical development agenda that opposed slavery, racism, and monopoly (p. 1).
Chapters one through three consider the founding of New Orleans in 1719 leading up to the aftermath of the Great Flood of 1927–28. Woods establishes the tempo of the book, which charts the rise of Bourbonism in early modern New Orleans (including banks, financial service firms, law firms, shipping interests, and the planter elite) and its many renaissances over time. In these chapters, the expressions of Bourbonism included the introduction of the Code Noir in 1724, the violence of the transition from chattel slavery to sharecropping, postReconstruction withdrawal of key health and housing services, mob violence (including post-Reconstruction lynching of Black plantation deserters, and the Robert Charles affair in 1900). Equally important for Woods are the key Blues moments marking these violences: (1) the Mardi Gras Indian movement that reclaimed public space against social and political bulldozing of Black New Orleaneans (p. 65); (2) Black Labor movements including the New Orleans General Strike of 1892; (3) the rise of social institutions/pleasure clubs to provide services in the wake of Reconstruction’s repeal (p. 63); and (4) the rise of Black Internationalism in the form of Garvey’s UNIA (p. 63) among others. Chapter three ends with the Great Flood of 1927 and its aftermath, a foreshadowing of Katrina and a critique of the disasters embedded in the everyday lives of Black New Orleaneans. Predicting Katrina, the great flood of 1927 resulted in tens of thousands of Black New Orleneans displaced and packed into warehouses, with most payouts too meager to pay for food or clean water during the process of rebuilding (p. 109). For Woods, the Flood of 1927 marked a return of Bourbonism.
This dialectic of Bourbonism and the Blues repeats itself in chapters four through six, beginning with the election of Huey Long in 1928 and his widespread take-down of Bourbon politics, which included free school lunches, free school textbooks, free health clinics, adult night schools, and a large-scale employment program (p. 114). In his attempt to appeal to a wide base, Mayor Long had incorporated elements of the Bourbon bloc itself, and by the time the Great Depression reached its apex, the New Deal had effectively re-shuffled the cards in favor of Louisiana’s planter elite, marking the return of Bourbonism once again (p. 120). The Blues moment that immediately followed was marked by a revival of Mardi Gras Indian culture and its recollection of New Orleans’s African and Native American roots/histories of fugitive struggle, a renewed veneration for the Saints (ancestral figures in past struggles), and the rise of the Spiritual Church Renaissance (p. 138) and its West African, Native American, and Catholic syncretism. Bourbonism re-emerged during the Second World War, as those who were not conscripted into the armed forces were “picked off the streets and forced to work in fields” (p. 147), leaving urban employment on shipyards and in other industries for white workers. This coincided with the removal of farm worker protections in 1941 (p. 149). The Blues response to this crisis was the “gumbo ethic” (p. 149) of families rotating responsibilities for feeding, clothing, and sheltering one another’s family members. This gumbo ethic would be short lived as war veterans returned home to a series of post-war “reforms” that predicted the oncoming storm of neoliberalism. These reforms included the clearing of wetlands for suburbanization/subsequent white flight and urban ghettoization (pp. 150–52), discrimination against Black war vets by the Federal Housing Administration and in employment (p. 162); and the subsequent celling of thousands of Black families into newly constructed housing projects. By the 1960s, over fifty percent of Black families in New Orleans were living in poverty (p. 161).
This was the social/political/environmental reality when Hurricane Betsy made landfall in 1965, dubbed the biggest natural disaster in American history at the time (p. 163). Causing over one billion dollars in infrastructural damage, Betsy was a human catastrophe as well. One survivor remarked that she could see “babies and snakes” floating in the floodwaters, while city officials warned that roughly one hundred alligators from St. John’s Bayou were openly roaming the streets (p. 164). Woods refers to the pre-Betsy neglect and the post-Betsy institutional failures as “death by submersion” (p. 165), a reminder that were it not for institutional failures such as the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet Canal (which funneled storm water into the lower ninth ward) and the clearing of wetlands, Betsy’s impact might have been entirely different. Chapter six concludes by detailing the subsequent dance between the Blues and Bourbonism from 1965–77. The Blues philosophy, in the wake of the biggest ecological disaster in American history, would inspire an incredible surge in Black political organizing, which included the founding of the Deacons of Defense in 1964, the spread of the Black Panther Party, an increase in student revolts throughout Louisiana, the founding of the Southern Organization for Unified Leadership and many others. Bourbonism’s backlash reflected the violence of the spread of neoliberalism via suburbanization/ continued white flight and urban neglect, the building of an interstate that cross- sectioned public parks and sites of gathering in the historical Treme neighborhood, “slum clearance” and the bulldozing of historic homes and Jazz houses, urban sprawl and the continued destruction of wetlands, and the rise of social science as a tool for racist policy-making (pp. 205–209).
Though the title suggests otherwise, DD does not address Hurricane Katrina directly until chapters seven and eight. Chapter seven unpacks “the disaster before the disaster” (p. 216), which included two major Bourbon feats—the transformation of Louisiana into an (offshore) petroarchy (and the ecological damage it created) and the criminalization of poverty that led to the transformation of Louisiana into a carceral state, boasting the highest execution rate per capita (p. 240) and an overrepresentation of Black residents in Louisiana prisons. To make matters worse, the rise of the Middle Eastern petro-states created an oil bust in states like Louisiana (p. 231), leading to a massive unemployment crisis and an increase in arrests for nonviolent drug-related crimes. New Orleans’s poor, Black residents were in the midst of disaster prior to Hurricane Katrina making landfall. Chapter eight, the shortest chapter, leads us to the Katrina moment—the well- documented malfeasance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, news agencies’ disregard for grieving Black families as they broadcast images of dead bodies and abandoned homes, and President George Bush’s failure to respond or design an adequately coordinated relief effort. The shortness of this chapter is compensated by the density of the previous ones. This makes complete sense since the calamity of Katrina was hidden in plain sight since the founding of New Orleans centuries prior.
This text is, in no hyperbolic terms, marvelous. It is at once a social history that is also political geography, political philosophy, and sociological study. It demonstrates a mastery of the anti-disciplinary impulse of Black Studies, a blueprint for Black Studies scholars who remain committed to the ethical implications of Black study, against and beyond disciplinary and epistemic limits. Methodologically, this book is a demonstration of the very “gumbo ethic” Woods invokes, drawing on a range of sources and texts to create a collage befitting the complexity and beauty of life and history in Black New Orleans. It is dense in archival and theoretical offerings, rigorous in its analysis yet fundamentally an imaginative text. In a similar manner as W.E.B. Dubois’s Black Reconstruction, DD is both a detailed political/geographic history as well as a commentary on the durability of these Bourbonist systems in our present. Clyde Woods was a thinker whose work continues to open discussions concerning philosophy, geography, history, and expressive culture(s). We would be remiss if we did not consider what might have been possible had Woods not passed on so prematurely. Reading the text, one descends into a counterpoint of euphoria and melancholy—for the futures rendered possible and for the brevity of his life. Yet the afterlife of Woods’s works provides a necessary reminder of the countless (latent and manifest) struggles of Black people in the deep South and beyond. Despite our current predicament under 45’s administration, DD reminds us that with every Bourbon moment/swing toward Authoritarianism, there has always been an equal and often greater opposing movement—that of the Blues.
