I am reading Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, published posthumously by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido. The publication year (2017) is twelve years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and three years before this year’s COVID-19 pandemic. I feel like I am reading this book from the future, the past, and the present all at once. Next to Parables of the Sower, it is difficult to find a more prescient text.
Everything he wrote about happened, over and over, over centuries. Everything he wrote about happened again, after his passing and has been happening to New Orleans since. And everything he wrote about is happening now, not just to New Orleans, which is always the canary in the coal mine (“Black New Orleans is the center of the world”), but to all Black and working-class people across the United States. Clyde Woods wrote against enclosure. He wrote as a diviner of the past and as a scryer of Black futures.
I use the hashtag #AlwaysClydeWoods often. But I might change it to #ClydeWoodsWasRight.
For clarity, here is how I break down the Bourbon and Blues Restorations/Reconstructions/Revolutions/Renaissance discussed (he uses all of these words in ways that seem interchangeable right now, but may actually have more nuance when I go back to reread again):
Bourbon Revolution (i.e. enclosure):
upward wealth creation
alliances between federal, regional, and local elites including political contracts and coalitions
starve/defund (i.e. cut taxes) social welfare/public programs then blame the ensuing chaos on those social welfare/public programs to starve them again
extract people and environmental resources for the use/profit of a minority of elites (which requires curbing, curtailing, and divesting Black and working-class people of resources — which itself requires curbing, curtailing, and divesting Black and working-class people of their human and civil rights)
Metonyms: Bourbon bloc, "massive resistance," "starve the beast," Redemption
Blues Revolution (i.e. the commons):
horizontal resource sharing (my words to contrast with upward wealth creation)
forming coalitions across the working-class, bridging race, gender, ethnicity, origin, and more.
organized resistance and protest in every form (peaceful to armed, individual to collective)
marroonage/escape as an institution
investment in arts and cultural programming as necessary knowledge
investing in spiritual knowledge and protection as necessary knowledge
community markets and cooperative economic alliances (“frontier-exchange economy” to food banks)
stewardship (not ownership or extraction) of land, water, and food resources for optimal sustainability, use and access by present and future generations, whether human, animal or otherwise.
Metonyms: Blues development tradition, blues epistemology
Reading through his text, I could apply these bullet points well beyond New Orleans, but Woods uses the two more local concepts of the "Blues" and the "Bourbon" to name these contrasting views of society. New Orleans, which was founded by the French then transferred from France to Spain over the course of the eighteenth century, was founded under the Bourbon dynasties who themselves ruled both France and Spain. And the Blues is a Black musical tradition deeply rooted in and accountable to Black people of the Mississippi Delta. If I’m to judge, this is Woods’ way of centering intellectual traditions from Mississippi Gulf Coast and southern life in proportion to the heady power they deserve and exercised in the world. The local context explains something important about U.S. (and global) social and political realities, past and present.
Woods is doing what good scholars should do--make visible existing theoretical frameworks already in use by the people making history in real time. Scholars often take seriously that there is a philosophy, ideology, and vision behind the history of resource extraction and institutional consolidation associated with the plantation complex, neoliberalism, Reaganism, Redemption, and white supremacy. There is no shortage of books about southern conservatives or the rise of Jim Crow. What Woods also takes seriously is that there is a philosophy, ideology, and theoretical framework that likewise organizes an alternate vision of society and community, and that this wasn’t generated by other elites, but by the people and communities most vulnerable to the predations of Bourbon politics.
These were people who might accurately and once upon a time have been called "the folk" (at a recent Black World Seminar, University of Michigan Professor Jason Young reminded me that “the folk is a power concept”). Today we often hear them/us described using a host of interlocking terms like Black, poor, working-class, Indigenous, undocumented, Global South, subalterns or even, following Fanon, les damnés de terre (the wretched of the Earth). What we don't hear enough about is their/our ideologies and politics as indigenous to our material realities, as more than counter to or revisions of frameworks drawn by Western theorists (i.e. Marx). The Blues epistemology is one of many intellectual traditions we introduced to the known world, creating out of the muck of slavery and colonialism. We made this critique of enclosure and it was made by Black folk for Black folk, but/and also for the world. Both can be true and can be happening at the same time.
In the case of the Blues, we did this theoretical work even from the grounds of the plantation. We created the commons even in the heart of plantation society. The monstrosities critiqued likewise have a history that reaches back into and is informed by slavery and its corollaries: empire and colonialism.
The history of this present is directly tied to this past. The claims for redress being made by Black communities in 2020 (like "Defund the Police") are directly tied to how enslaved people imagined and fought to create a different kind of relationship between individuals, communities, the land, the Earth, and to struggle to model care for each other in a way that isn’t the master-slave relationship, or about laboring over a cash crop, or the consolidation of life-saving resources in the hands of a regressive elite.
The strategies enslaved people used to wage their fight against the plantation bloc, including drawing new lines of relation between Black and Indigenous, Black and the people who would become known as Latinx or Brown, Black and working-class white, strategies that while coalitional were also always deeply rooted in Black community and the specific needs of Black people’s relationship to the land, to each other, and to the future—these strategies became the foundation of the Blues epistemology.
If, in other words, we listen to what enslaved people taught each other about how to navigate slavery, itself a hellish plane of existence, then we have all we need as far as tools to fight the fight for a socially just society and all we need as far as how to imagine otherwise into what kind of society that looks like. Even during a pandemic. Even during a coup.
“Yet every generation of Americans has been forced to relearn this enduring lesson, to relearn the Blues.” Clyde Woods, 275
If we study the history of slavery, we already know what kind of society will come after defund the police and abolition, because we've seen it in glimpses (Black elected officials at the head of Radical Reconstruction governments, broad suffrage, safe autonomous spaces for living and building communities, healthy land and water supplies, the joy and community of the juke joint or the block party, resources enough for everyone and distributed to everyone, labor that doesn’t destroy the body, mind, or soul). We even already know how to get there (economic cooperatives, centering working-class multiracial organizing, seeing the Bourbon blocs for what they are whether they appear or reappear as sugar, cotton, oil, shipping, technology, real estate, health care, education, etc. and breaking their alliances and challenging their consolidations using every tool at our disposal).
We know it because enslaved Africans and people of African descent already mounted the greatest critique of our present moment the world has ever seen. We just have to listen to them.