|
Remembering
Professor Clyde Woods
By
Mark Anthony Neal
|
These groups [the black
poor of the Mississippi Delta] learned a
painful lesson that many scholars have yet
to learn; slavery and the plantation are not
an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of
it…Slavery, sharecropping, mechanization,
and prison, wage, and migratory labor are
just a few permutations possible within a
plantation complex. None of these forms
changes the basic features of resource
monopoly and extreme ethnic and class
polarization.—Clyde
Woods |
I first read
Professor Clyde Woods’
Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power
in the Mississippi Delta (Verso) shortly after
it and my book
What the Music Said were published. My immediate
reaction was “damn, think I need to go back to the lab.”
Thirteen years later,
Development Arrested remains the most
sophisticated analysis of the political economy of Black
music that has been published in the last generation, in
part because Woods never lost sight of the fact that the
very economic engines that drove the degradation and
exploitation of Black workers in the Delta, inspired a
resistance to those engines in the music of the
region—not simply through ideological retorts, but in
creating something that soothed the souls of a people
well beyond weary.
Yet the brilliance
of the man’s work, paled in the light of the man’s
humanity; He was simply “Good People.” Professor Woods
and I crossed paths finally in 2003, in a way that
bespeaks his good and supportive nature; he simply
showed up to a reading that my friend and journalist
Esther Iverem hosted at her Washington DC home in
support of my book
Songs in the Key of Black Life.
What I recall from that first encounter, is meeting a
dude that I wished I had had the opportunity to connect
with much earlier in my professional life. Still can
remember talking to him about Hip-Hop’s Blues
aesthetic, as he reeled off lyric after lyric from
Scarface to make his point. I never heard Scarface, or
Southern rap for that matter, the same after that.
Over the past few
years I was fortunate enough to run into Professor Woods
fairly regularly at the annual American Studies
Association meeting. Last time I saw him, was at the
2009 American Studies Meeting in Washington DC; he was
holding court, fittingly, with a group of students and
New Orleans poet and activist
Kalamu ya Salaam. Months
later his edited volume
In the Wake of Hurricane
Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions was
published, putting a fine point on all of the
scholarship that was produced in the wake of Katrina.
Yet, as in all of his work, Professor Woods found that
common thread to Black humanity, in what he regularly
referred to as the “blues tradition of investigation and
interpretation.”
There are many
scholars who make lasting impressions with their work,
but comparatively few that make those same impressions
as simply good people. Professor Clyde Woods was the
rare person who did both. He will be missed.
Source:
NewBlackMan
* *
* * *
Development
Arrested has no peer, for Clyde Woods is a rare scholar
who takes the blues seriously as theory and social
critique. Arguing that this folk discourse emerged in
response to economic and political restructuring in the
Delta during the 20th century, he goes on to show how it
constitutes a critique of the plantation South, New
South modernization, and the transformation of
capitalist agriculture during the so-called Green
Revolution. To paraphrase something Marx said a long
time ago, Development Arrested reveals the
connection between the arm of criticism (i.e., the
blues/social science) and the criticism of arms:
struggle for power in the Delta.—Robin
D.G. Kelley
* *
* * *
Professor Woods
earned his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA
and has taught at Pennsylvania State University and the
University of Maryland His research focuses on the
regional organization of poverty, power, race, and
culture in the United States. His first book, Development
Arrested examined these relationships in the
rural Mississippi Delta and his upcoming study will
address the role these social forces played in the
construction of Black Los Angeles, from 1781 to the
present. Another research area focuses on the
philosophical and analytic contributions of Blues, Jazz,
and Hip Hop. As part of this work, he recently
co-edited Black Geographies and the Politics of Place with
Katherine McKittrick. Finally, Professor Woods has
initiated two long-term-research projects based in the
Department. The first examines and supports the
rebuilding efforts in New Orleans. The second project is
designed to create a network of community members and
scholars who are both studying Black Los Angeles and
developing innovative policy solutions.—BlackStudies
* *
* * *
Clyde
Woods, Renowned Black Studies Scholar, Dies in
Santa Barbara
Clyde
Woods, 54, an associate professor at UC Santa
Barbara and a distinguished scholar whose
research examined social and public policy
issues by studying the cultural practices of
those oppressed by them, died July 6 at Cottage
Hospital in Santa Barbara, according to an
announcement by the Department of Black Studies.
Woods, who was also acting director
of the Center for Black Studies Research, began teaching at UCSB in
2005. His work demonstrated his overarching belief that the purpose of
public social science is to explore and strengthen the links between
knowledge embedded in communities of color and the knowledge
disseminated by universities. . . . Woods was the author of three
important books, including the recently published
In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010);
Development Arrested - Race, Power and the Blues in the Mississippi
Delta (Verso, 1998), an interdisciplinary work that reframed the
history of the Mississippi Delta by unearthing and interpreting the
blues epistemology of its residents; and “Development Drowned and
Reborn,” a study of post-Katrina New Orleans that is currently under
review by the University of California Press. At the time of his death,
Woods was also working on a book on Black California, and a new edition
of “Development Arrested.”
A dedicated mentor and teacher to undergraduate and
graduate students, Woods sparked interest in important topics related to
Hurricane Katrina, Haiti, Black California, Black farmers, the education
and prison systems, and the politics of rural capitalization. He was a
master of one-on-one motivation of students of color, and his success as
an educator outlined a practice of research-based teaching at the
cutting edge of social science.
Woods was also a leader in several
campus-wide initiatives, including the Black California Project; and the
environmental racism-environmental justice curriculum initiative
established in collaboration with UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental
Science & Management and Department of Environmental Studies.— Independent
* *
* * *
Clyde Woods—Author (YouTube)
Clyde Woods, professor of
Afro-American Studies at the University of Maryland,
College Park, is author of the ground-breaking study,
Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power
in the Mississippi Delta. Woods speaks of the Blues
both as music and as the unique philosophy of life that
fostered the survival and creativity of the African
American culture of the rural south. He reads a moving
portrayal of the 'Blues Transformation,' by Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr., that produced the Poor People's March
on Washington in 1968.
* *
* * *
|
Development Arrested
The Blues and Plantation Power
in the Mississippi Delta
By Clyde Woods
Development Arrested has no peer, for Clyde
Woods is a rare scholar who takes the blues seriously as
theory and social critique. Arguing that this folk discourse
emerged in response to economic and political restructuring
in the Delta during the 20th century, he goes on to show how
it constitutes a critique of the plantation South, New South
modernization, and the transformation of capitalist
agriculture during the so-called Green Revolution. To
paraphrase something Marx said a long time ago,
Development Arrested reveals the
connection between the arm of criticism (i.e., the
blues/social science) and the criticism of arms: struggle
for power in the Delta.—Robin
D.G. Kelley
Development Arrested remains the most
sophisticated analysis of the political economy of Black
music that has been published in the last generation, in
part because Woods never lost sight of the fact that the
very economic engines that drove the degradation and
exploitation of Black workers in the Delta, inspired a
resistance to those engines in the music of the region.—Mark
Anthony Neal |
 |
* *
* * *
 |
In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
New
Paradigms and Social Visions
By Clyde Woods
Assessing the damage
left by Hurricane Katrina in social, cultural, and physical
terms, the essays in this volume suggest that the nation's
long and historic engagement with the Gulf Coast has entered
a new era. While many of the essays analyze Katrina in terms
of the relatively recent past, others explore how reaction
to the hurricane's aftermath is rooted in the region's
history. Uniquely combining humanities and social sciences
research, the contributors re-evaluate the political,
social, and economic dynamics that existed before this
"natural" disaster and the subsequent responses and actions,
or lack thereof.
Investigations of
public policies, organizations, social movements, and
neo-liberalism range from a traditional policy case study of
the often-neglected Alabama and Mississippi experience to an
analysis of urban social movements in New Orleans to a broad
critique of local policy that has global implications.
Innovative young scholars provide essays on music,
literature, tourism, and gender. Interviews with key
community leaders and historic poets round out the volume.—Johns
Hopkins University Press
|
* *
* * *
|
Black Geographies and the Politics of Place
By
Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods
The history of black
people in the Americas and the Caribbean cannot be told
without addressing powerful geographical shifts: massive
forced migrations, land dispossession, and legal as well as
informal structures of segregation. From the Middle Passage
to the “Whites Only” signposts of US apartheid, the black
Diasporic experience is rooted firmly in the politics of
place. Literature has long explored the cultural differences
in the experience of blackness in different quarters of the
Diaspora. But what are the real differences between being a
maroon in the hills of Jamaica and a runaway in the swamps
of Florida? How does location impact repression and
resistance, both on the ground and in the terrain of
political imagination? Enter
Black Geographies.
In this path-breaking collection, fourteen authors
interrogate the intersection between space and race. For
instance, confronted with the importance of space in black
cultural creation and preservation, some activists have
sought to protect or restore black historical sites such as
Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” and the African Burial Ground in
New York City. For the dispossessed, all markers of history
and belonging, including cultural property, become
paramount. Yet each of these sites has in common acts of
racial hatred and state terrorism that have left few of the
historical structures standing—making them unlikely
candidates for preservation. This begs the question: Is it
even possible that advocating for preserving historic
locations can act as a vehicle for social justice and spur
community redevelopment? |
 |
* *
* * *
 |
What the Music Said
Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture
By Mark Anthony Neal
While ably describing the ways in which
the "aural landscapes" of noted performers like John
Coltrane and Anita Baker comment on the social realities of
their day, Neal is more concerned with social history than
with musicology. His interpretations of music are closely
informed by the impact of developments like Reconstruction,
mass migration, urbanization, the civil rights movement and
the rise of the black middle class on the African-American
community at large. He is attuned to the nuance given to
accounts of the black experience by class and gender at
specific historical moments. He also charts the impact of
the commercialization of various forms of black popular
music, which, he argues, has often compromised the ability
of their music to serve as an authentic articulation of
African-American values and experience. However,
commercialization is not, for Neal, the end of the cycle:
when a genre becomes too heavily mediated by market forces,
he says, black artists simply find new modes of
self-expression. In this deftly written study, Neal
persuasively demonstrates that, from the spirituals sung by
slaves to 20th-century blues, jazz, be-bop and soul, music
has provided important "aural public space" in which
African-American communities have been able to share and
evaluate their collective experiences.—Publishers
Weekly |
* *
* * *
posted 9 July 2011 |
