4.5
Development Arrested
ByPublisher Description
Explore the riveting history of the 200-year-old conflict between the planter elite and African Americans of the Mississippi River Delta.
“A stunning and fresh analysis of the political economy of white supremacy and the redemptive power of the blues.” —Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of The African American Odyssey
Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of centuries-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice.
Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.
“A stunning and fresh analysis of the political economy of white supremacy and the redemptive power of the blues.” —Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of The African American Odyssey
Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of centuries-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice.
Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesDevelopment Arrested Reviews
4.5
nilsjepson
Created over 1 year agoShare
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“I see Woods' intervention as two-fold. First, he dispels the mythology that the post-Civil War enclosure of the Mississippi Delta was a movement from feudalism to capitalism and instead propose that it was a movement, guided by the Delta Plantation bloc, from "capital-scarce, labor-intensive plantation production to capital-intensive, labor-surplus neo-plantantion production" (127) to permanently open the gates to "new forms of segregation and slavery" (288). Woods, then, emphasizes that the development of the Mississippi Delta by the Plantation Block -- from initial levy projects and genocidal expulsion through the Trail of Tears to current (in the 90s) federal/regional programs like the LMDCC's 10-year development strategy or Clinton and Fordice's "Work First" program in Mississippi -- as an explicitly racial project to reproduce Plantation monopolies by burning, gutting, lynching, over-working Black communities. Woods writes: "there was no development without terror" (86).
Second, he proposes a "blues epistemology" for development in response, which he describes as the "dialectical ability of working-class communities to revitalize themselves using their own cultural reservoirs to push their own historic development agenda forward, ever forward" (140). He talks through musicians like Ma Rainey, "Georgia Tom," Ike Turner, writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and activists like Fannie Lou Hammer and MLK Jr (especially in his later, "Poor Peoples Campaign"-focused years) as essential figures who were able to verbalize and incorporate "blues as epistemology' (which itself is created communally through millions of working-class, Black "organic intellectuals" (289)) into their work.
These two interventions structure most of Woods's book: most chapters first dive into the (almost) hegemonic development paradigm of the Plantation block at a moment in time, before outlining the working-class response by focusing on the evolution of the blues, both as a musical form and a strategy of activist development. His structure here, and his emphasis on treating the Blues as a subject worthy of social scientific inquiry specifically, was pretty exhilarating to read and something I hope to think about in terms of taking working class scholarship -- whether that be through artistic intervention or otherwise -- serious in my own research. And what, exactly, does it mean to take this scholarship "seriously," when forms of cultural resistance like the Blues aren't considered worthy of scholarly approach in the first place? In my housing work, we talk about how tenants, and not developers or planners or landlords or politicians or academics, are experts on their own housing conditions. I guess I want to push this idea a bit further: what domestic interventions and modes of explicit cultural expression do tenants create -- both in their home and out -- to build an archive and agenda for housing justice scholarship? And I wonder if this form of "development" is as cohesive as a movement like "the Blues" or more disparate and localized?
Lastly, if teaching Woods, it might honestly be helpful to walk linearly through the 12 Mississippi Delta plans which structure the book and overview what that instance of the plan looked like, who was in charge, and how was it implemented. After, I would pair this exercise by giving student groups one of the songs/poems Woods mentions and then have them do a close reading of the song itself, while also them to contextualize the song in the musician's biography. Hopefully these two exercises would highlight the contradictions between these two very different modes of development, their origins, and their possibilities.”
Syd Smith
Created about 2 years agoShare
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Trevor Murphy [He]
Created over 3 years agoShare
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About Clyde Woods
Clyde Woods (1957–2011) was an Associate Professor of Black Studies and Acting Director of the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His other books include Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans.
Other books by Clyde Woods
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