Review of Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, by Clyde Woods

Abstract

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