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ahayes15's review against another edition
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Incredibly comprehensive look at the history of the development of New Orleans and how white supremacy and plantation economics were foundational to its founding and continue to impact nearly every aspect of social and economic life there. The author puts it very succinctly when he says that "the readers of this book have a special responsibility. They must carefully and repeatedly investigate a reality that significantly contradicts current representations of social conditions, poverty, crime, deviancy, African Americans, and normalcy.”
gabsalott13's review against another edition
4.0
In Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, Clyde Woods and his posthumous editors cover centuries of political, economic, and environmental history in Southeastern Louisiana. In addition to enjoying reading a book by someone committed to troubling their education as an urban planner, I enjoyed the spiritual arc Woods sets in this book, as New Orleans’ Black geographies are engaged in a multigenerational battle between good and evil, represented by the Blues development tradition and the (neo-)Bourbon plantation bloc. While the exact definition of the Blues development tradition is slippery, Woods provides a summary of its key goals on 137: “participatory democracy, economic justice, cultural autonomy, building sustainable working-class communities, and recognizing important works regardless of a person’s gender, age, ability, religion, ethnicity, race, and nationality.” I found it appropriate that Woods tracked the shifting agendas of the Blues development tradition at various points in history, because to me, Woods’ concept is similar to what others have defined as freedom dreams. It makes sense that collective visions for the future would evolve over time to encapsulate individual experiences and movements. One of the most powerful and constant throughlines in the blues development tradition is its emphasis on “cooperative forms of…production and land reform” as a means to “end the domination of the plantation bloc.” In this way, the blues development tradition is hand in hand with what Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard calls the Black cooperative tradition.
The Black cooperative tradition is a key political, academic, personal, and professional interest of mine, in part because I’ve seen firsthand that it offers so many useful lessons for urban planners who hope to use our education to support movements for Black liberation. Because of this, I was pleasantly surprised by how many times cooperative economics were referenced in Woods’ history of Southeastern Louisiana organizing. While Gordon Nembhard illustrates that Black Americans used cooperative strategies at every point since their history on this country, she illustrates three particular “heydays” of Black cooperative activity: immediately following Reconstruction, during the Great Depression, and in the midst of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. When Woods covers each of these time periods in Louisiana, he also notes Black residents’ use of farm cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and community survival programs. In addition to the fact that Woods and Nembhard are covering similar actions at similar time periods, their works show how the Black cooperative tradition and the blues development tradition are connected in ideology. Woods illustrates how both traditions challenge hegemonic plantation blocs by collectively forming a “preexisting parallel and alternative legal system and social order”, and both traditions incorporate an “ethic of caring and sharing” that is central to the survival of Black people and places.
However, while the end of Collective Courage left me motivated about the opportunities to embrace and pitfalls to avoid as a 21st-century cooperator, Woods’ text barely engages the so-called Third Reconstruction. This disappointed me because one of the central arguments of my final paper is that AfroCarolina’s Black cooperative tradition hasn’t disappeared, but evolved into “new” structures. (In other cases, the “old” structures never even ended—rather, we academics and descendant generations have lost the cultural knowhow to recognize cooperative formations created by what Woods would call organic intellectuals. ) I understand that Woods likely intended to speak more to the modern blues development tradition in Louisiana, but was prevented from doing so by his premature death. My fault lies moreso with the editors, who did little to fill in examples of the Blues development tradition after the 1970s. In this way, I fear that they contribute to the “obituary of Black communities” that Woods criticizes readers of his first book, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, for writing. , I would have loved to see Development Drowned and Reborn celebrate the powerful modern movements for Black liberation in New Orleans, though this maybe connects to my other problems with the book.
In addition to leaving out the Third Reconstruction’s role in continuing the blues development (and Black cooperative) tradition(s), I found it unfortunate that Woods avoided some Black geographies in the city, namely New Orleans East. In The Yellow House, author Sarah Broom notes the historic marginalization of her home neighborhood, which rarely makes it into the dominant geographic narratives about New Orleans, with the exception of “disaster tourism” coverage she observed after Hurricane Katrina. For Woods to be so critical of the Bourbon bloc’s spatial practices, his book could’ve been a great opportunity to continue the tradition of New Orleanians like Broom, who place New Orleans East in the center of the map. However, Woods is not from New Orleans, and perhaps falls victim to some of the disaster tourism Broom critiques in her book, and the disaster capitalism he critiques in his own. Woods offers a very useful analysis of the parachuting “outsiders” who profited off Black Louisianans after the region’s manmade disasters, including the First Reconstruction, Great Flood of 1927, and of course, Hurricane Katrina. In Woods’ own words, “the looting of Black…communities has been the principal sport of the New Orleans Bourbon and Mississippi Delta blocs for generations. After Katrina regional leaders were joined by a national network of predatory firms, institutions, consultants, experts, and politicians to loot New Orleans…” I’m not suggesting that he wrote this book with extractive intentions, but I don’t think Woods, who was raised in Baltimore, can fully avoid being complicit in this legacy of extraction simply because he studied and supported various social movements. While Woods was not alive to see any post-publication profits from Development Drowned and Reborn, it’s likely that the advances and institutional research funding that he received to write it were not completely separate from that legacy. As someone who grew up in two different towns (which some have argued means I’m “really” from neither place), I have a lot of questions about the ethics of studying Black geographies when you are an outsider. While I deeply enjoyed this book’s ideological concepts and radical approach to planning theory, it appears that my moral questions about this type of research must be answered by other sources.
Bibliography
Bazile, Sabrina. “Alternative Community Economic Development.” urban planners as organizers towards liberation: a resource guide and framework, July 9, 2021. https://www.planforliberation.space/alternative-economic-development.
Broom, Sarah M. Yellow House. New York: New York : Grove Press, 2019., 2019. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9710665.
Gordon Nembhard, Jessica, 1956-. Collective Courage : A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park, Pennsylvania: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2014], 2014. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb7831186.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams : The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Boston : Beacon Press, c2002., 2002. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb4161045.
Lanier, Michelle. “Home Going: A Spirit-Centered Ethnography Exploring the Transformative Journey of Documenting Gullah/Geechee Funerals.” Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008., 2008. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCETDm613mz84g.
Purifoy, Danielle M. “‘To Live and Thrive on New Earths’: The Earthseed Land Collective and Black Freedom.” Southern Cultures 26, no. 4 (2020): 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1353/SCU.2020.0056.
Roane, J. T. “Plotting the Black Commons.” Souls (Boulder, Colo.) 20, no. 3 (2018): 239–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2018.1532757.
Woods, Clyde Adrian. Development Arrested : The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: London ; New York : Verso, 1998., 1998. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb3193140.
———. “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source.” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 427–53.
———. “Life After Death.” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 62–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00315.
Woods, Clyde, Jordan T. Camp, and Laura Pulido. Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Book, Whole, 2017. http://unc.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwtV3NS-QwFA9-7GHBg7q7qKuSi16WLmnSNO2ClxFFGEHBWfe2JWlSGBhbcSqs__2-13Q6oeBhD3spzWtpob_XvI-83wshgn9n0WhOcFxaDCZyphU3Mi3TxKpMgr21mOPHBd7HibidqqtJMus7ACM1Zi38r8iDDLBHJu0_oD88FARwDjoAR9ACOI4c5GHoFSAoB_pmMdh21heT4wxTr6otzALsQifH9KZpkN2CBZNBjXmzbKMpdvKvdVcOefeycLoefPFfTWN9n4LFmx3UBNc0fHb-xcIUMpRi378u5rZZMbJ1mHSIVZB08A23wHEQ6GvItR1ZrZ2PzMtQ9AehGsRGEJCdY1fzJzsv2wtXRz8fNsmmYLjtxmR6u86PZbGAyaRr2enfxcJBLPvuSauLozHuMPoBiT2vy8BfmO2SLeSQ7JENV--To4EURM-pp0NT353l7RP5HcBEe5gowEE9TD8ogEQ7kDppDxINQaLzmoYgUQCJ9iB9Jo_XV7PLm6jf8yLSQkgwWjzVGrwsB55slSolIGDWJcSkuSkzJnLjrICgNmO5rlySi0QlkitWSiPjlPFK8i9kRyM5om47EqU9IJQbI-LU6jSXSaKt0FVlcpdCZFAxbqrkkJz5T1U8-xYnBS-WvGBFJplQ4K8opYr2T3tIDkb3DZgevX_pK_m4VqFjsl3Bn-VOwJWry9MO879ZF0VI.
The Black cooperative tradition is a key political, academic, personal, and professional interest of mine, in part because I’ve seen firsthand that it offers so many useful lessons for urban planners who hope to use our education to support movements for Black liberation. Because of this, I was pleasantly surprised by how many times cooperative economics were referenced in Woods’ history of Southeastern Louisiana organizing. While Gordon Nembhard illustrates that Black Americans used cooperative strategies at every point since their history on this country, she illustrates three particular “heydays” of Black cooperative activity: immediately following Reconstruction, during the Great Depression, and in the midst of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. When Woods covers each of these time periods in Louisiana, he also notes Black residents’ use of farm cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and community survival programs. In addition to the fact that Woods and Nembhard are covering similar actions at similar time periods, their works show how the Black cooperative tradition and the blues development tradition are connected in ideology. Woods illustrates how both traditions challenge hegemonic plantation blocs by collectively forming a “preexisting parallel and alternative legal system and social order”, and both traditions incorporate an “ethic of caring and sharing” that is central to the survival of Black people and places.
However, while the end of Collective Courage left me motivated about the opportunities to embrace and pitfalls to avoid as a 21st-century cooperator, Woods’ text barely engages the so-called Third Reconstruction. This disappointed me because one of the central arguments of my final paper is that AfroCarolina’s Black cooperative tradition hasn’t disappeared, but evolved into “new” structures. (In other cases, the “old” structures never even ended—rather, we academics and descendant generations have lost the cultural knowhow to recognize cooperative formations created by what Woods would call organic intellectuals. ) I understand that Woods likely intended to speak more to the modern blues development tradition in Louisiana, but was prevented from doing so by his premature death. My fault lies moreso with the editors, who did little to fill in examples of the Blues development tradition after the 1970s. In this way, I fear that they contribute to the “obituary of Black communities” that Woods criticizes readers of his first book, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, for writing. , I would have loved to see Development Drowned and Reborn celebrate the powerful modern movements for Black liberation in New Orleans, though this maybe connects to my other problems with the book.
In addition to leaving out the Third Reconstruction’s role in continuing the blues development (and Black cooperative) tradition(s), I found it unfortunate that Woods avoided some Black geographies in the city, namely New Orleans East. In The Yellow House, author Sarah Broom notes the historic marginalization of her home neighborhood, which rarely makes it into the dominant geographic narratives about New Orleans, with the exception of “disaster tourism” coverage she observed after Hurricane Katrina. For Woods to be so critical of the Bourbon bloc’s spatial practices, his book could’ve been a great opportunity to continue the tradition of New Orleanians like Broom, who place New Orleans East in the center of the map. However, Woods is not from New Orleans, and perhaps falls victim to some of the disaster tourism Broom critiques in her book, and the disaster capitalism he critiques in his own. Woods offers a very useful analysis of the parachuting “outsiders” who profited off Black Louisianans after the region’s manmade disasters, including the First Reconstruction, Great Flood of 1927, and of course, Hurricane Katrina. In Woods’ own words, “the looting of Black…communities has been the principal sport of the New Orleans Bourbon and Mississippi Delta blocs for generations. After Katrina regional leaders were joined by a national network of predatory firms, institutions, consultants, experts, and politicians to loot New Orleans…” I’m not suggesting that he wrote this book with extractive intentions, but I don’t think Woods, who was raised in Baltimore, can fully avoid being complicit in this legacy of extraction simply because he studied and supported various social movements. While Woods was not alive to see any post-publication profits from Development Drowned and Reborn, it’s likely that the advances and institutional research funding that he received to write it were not completely separate from that legacy. As someone who grew up in two different towns (which some have argued means I’m “really” from neither place), I have a lot of questions about the ethics of studying Black geographies when you are an outsider. While I deeply enjoyed this book’s ideological concepts and radical approach to planning theory, it appears that my moral questions about this type of research must be answered by other sources.
Bibliography
Bazile, Sabrina. “Alternative Community Economic Development.” urban planners as organizers towards liberation: a resource guide and framework, July 9, 2021. https://www.planforliberation.space/alternative-economic-development.
Broom, Sarah M. Yellow House. New York: New York : Grove Press, 2019., 2019. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9710665.
Gordon Nembhard, Jessica, 1956-. Collective Courage : A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park, Pennsylvania: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2014], 2014. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb7831186.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams : The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Boston : Beacon Press, c2002., 2002. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb4161045.
Lanier, Michelle. “Home Going: A Spirit-Centered Ethnography Exploring the Transformative Journey of Documenting Gullah/Geechee Funerals.” Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008., 2008. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCETDm613mz84g.
Purifoy, Danielle M. “‘To Live and Thrive on New Earths’: The Earthseed Land Collective and Black Freedom.” Southern Cultures 26, no. 4 (2020): 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1353/SCU.2020.0056.
Roane, J. T. “Plotting the Black Commons.” Souls (Boulder, Colo.) 20, no. 3 (2018): 239–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2018.1532757.
Woods, Clyde Adrian. Development Arrested : The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: London ; New York : Verso, 1998., 1998. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb3193140.
———. “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source.” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 427–53.
———. “Life After Death.” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 62–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00315.
Woods, Clyde, Jordan T. Camp, and Laura Pulido. Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Book, Whole, 2017. http://unc.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwtV3NS-QwFA9-7GHBg7q7qKuSi16WLmnSNO2ClxFFGEHBWfe2JWlSGBhbcSqs__2-13Q6oeBhD3spzWtpob_XvI-83wshgn9n0WhOcFxaDCZyphU3Mi3TxKpMgr21mOPHBd7HibidqqtJMus7ACM1Zi38r8iDDLBHJu0_oD88FARwDjoAR9ACOI4c5GHoFSAoB_pmMdh21heT4wxTr6otzALsQifH9KZpkN2CBZNBjXmzbKMpdvKvdVcOefeycLoefPFfTWN9n4LFmx3UBNc0fHb-xcIUMpRi378u5rZZMbJ1mHSIVZB08A23wHEQ6GvItR1ZrZ2PzMtQ9AehGsRGEJCdY1fzJzsv2wtXRz8fNsmmYLjtxmR6u86PZbGAyaRr2enfxcJBLPvuSauLozHuMPoBiT2vy8BfmO2SLeSQ7JENV--To4EURM-pp0NT353l7RP5HcBEe5gowEE9TD8ogEQ7kDppDxINQaLzmoYgUQCJ9iB9Jo_XV7PLm6jf8yLSQkgwWjzVGrwsB55slSolIGDWJcSkuSkzJnLjrICgNmO5rlySi0QlkitWSiPjlPFK8i9kRyM5om47EqU9IJQbI-LU6jSXSaKt0FVlcpdCZFAxbqrkkJz5T1U8-xYnBS-WvGBFJplQ4K8opYr2T3tIDkb3DZgevX_pK_m4VqFjsl3Bn-VOwJWry9MO879ZF0VI.
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