Development Drowned and Reborn

The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Clyde Woods, Nik Heynen, Mathew Coleman, Sapana Doshi, Laura Pulido, Jordan Camp

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780820350929, 9780820350912
• eBook ISBN: 9780820350905
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Development Drowned and Reborn is a "Blues geography" of New Orleans, one that compels readers to return to the history of the Black freedom struggle there to reckon with its unfinished business. Reading contemporary policies of abandonment against the grain, Clyde Woods explores how Hurricane Katrina brought long-standing structures of domination into view. In so doing, Woods delineates the roots of neoliberalism in the region and a history of resistance.

Written in dialogue with social movements, this book offers tools for comprehending the racist dynamics of U.S. culture and economy. Following his landmark study, Development Arrested, Woods turns to organic intellectuals, Blues musicians, and poor and working people to instruct readers in this future-oriented history of struggle. Through this unique optic, Woods delineates a history, methodology, and epistemology to grasp alternative visions of development.

Woods contributes to debates about the history and geography of neoliberalism. The book suggests that the prevailing focus on neoliberalism at national and global scales has led to a neglect of the regional scale. Specifically, it observes that theories of neoliberalism have tended to overlook New Orleans as an epicenter where racial, class, gender, and regional hierarchies have persisted for centuries. Through this Blues geography, Woods excavates the struggle for a new society.

CHAPTER 1

I Thought I Heard Samba Bambara Say

The Social Construction of New Orleans

The New Orleans region became a national and international center for social schism and social vision due to the historic movements launched by its people. Theorigins of this expansive geographical imagination were the product of the continental and global vision of the First Nations and of the European and African settlers. Spanning more than ten thousand years, Native Americans repeatedly transformed the regions that make up present-day Louisiana. Their traditions of development and social organization continue to resonate within Native American, African American, and white communities. During the first one hundred years of European colonization and settlement, various African ethnic groups were able to preserve and share their intellectual traditions in the French and Spanish colony of Louisiana. By the 1830s these multiple social, cultural, and development traditions contributed to the formation of the Blues tradition of ontology, epistemology, and development. This comprehensive development tradition was birthed by the creation of slavery within slavery. The birth of industrial capitalism and the manic demand for cotton from the Deep South by British manufacturers led to the brutal expulsion of Native Americans from the region, resulting in the Trail of Tears. At the same time, tens of thousands of African Americans were ripped from the brutal confines of Upper South slavery and “sold down the river” to the lawless cotton and sugar kingdoms of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee, the heartland of the Blues. In these troubled lands the Blues would soon become constitutional.

The Blues philosophical system fully emerged from the region after the Civil War. It was used to craft a common identity amid crisis and to investigate and transform regional realities. The first pillars of the Blues tradition were the philosophical discourse and social imperatives central to the Spirituals song movement as it moved westward. The second pillar was the multiple philosophies that informed the numerous freedom movements of the southeastern United States. The third pillar was crafted from the first two: an ethical development agenda that opposed slavery, racism, and monopoly in all of their manifestations. This agenda supported the realization of social justice and sustainable human, community, and cultural development.

The sections below examine the emergence of the Blues development agenda, its African and Native American predecessors, and its work to bring social justice to a region dominated by a powerful planter bloc during five distinctive regional regimes from 1699 to 1860. Native Americans in what became Louisiana established multiple traditions of community-development planning along with peaceful trading networks that stretched from Mexico City to Maine. The development traditions of the Natchez and other indigenous nations remained influential after the initial French colonization in 1699. Native American and African plans to create sustainable societies constantly undermined the imperial designs of the French Crown. This ongoing resistance and imperial war led to the transfer of the colony to Spain in 1765. The Haitian Revolution thwarted the reassertion of French control over Louisiana. The sale of the territory to the United States made Louisiana the center of numerous colonial projects and national schisms. By the 1850s, southern leaders were imagining New Orleans as the economic center of a separate nation. Throughout this tortured history, African Americans built a multidimensional culture in which the desire for freedom was expressed in thousands of different ways. To begin to comprehend the meaning of New Orleans and the gifts it will bring in the future, we must first turn to this history.

Mississippian Civilizations and Planning

The indigenous peoples of the region now known as New Orleans have witnessed the rise and fall of many civilizations. As the region considers its future, we must reflect on the First Nations’ contributions to regional consciousness. Louisiana has the second-largest Native American population in the eastern United States. The desperate circumstances in which many Native Americans find themselves today belie their contributions to world civilization. Their history is replete with social, cultural, economic, and intellectual innovations that have shaped the region’s material and conscious worlds. Rather than viewing indigenous traditions and peoples as relics of the past, we can understand them as manifesting many of the core principles necessary to construct a new North American commons based on social justice and sustainability.

Archeological evidence suggests that Native American settlements were present in southern Louisiana twelve thousand years ago. The recently discovered fifty-four-hundred-year-old Watson Brake site in northeast Louisiana is considered to be the oldest mound complex in North America. Between 2,000 b.c. and 600 b.c., a major civilization arose at a place now referred to as Poverty Point, in West Carroll Parish in northeast Louisiana. This religious, cultural, and trade center was organized around the largest earthen works in the Western Hemisphere. The complex provides evidence of the extension of Mexican and Central American social, cultural, technological, and planning innovations into the Lower Mississippi Valley. This year-round settlement centered on an octagonal mound complex, geometrically organized villages, strong religious and civil organizations, solar and stellar orientations, and a highly developed agricultural system whose staple crops were beans, maize, and squash. Radiating from this hub were more than 150 settlements, stretching from the Gulf Coast to the river valleys of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Several villages were within, and near, the present-day boundaries of New Orleans. This civilization influenced the theory and practice of governance, religion, culture, and economics in an area extending from Tennessee to Mexico and from Wisconsin to Florida.¹

The dissolution of the Poverty Point civilization around 600 b.c. resulted in a return to smaller regional complexes organized around seasonal movements. Transcontinental trade and multinational alliances were reestablished during the Mississippian Period, 800 a.d. to 1550 a.d. The first center of this new civilization was Cahokia, a city of ten thousand to forty thousand persons located a few miles east of present-day East St. Louis, Illinois. The city’s inhabitants introduced a new model of social organization: the intensive cultivation of staples, the production and storage of agricultural surpluses, craft specialization, urbanized year-round settlements, and a centralized social system organized around autonomous community, political, and religious institutions. Its central plaza was surrounded by large pyramidal mounds and by large towns with specialized religious and state functions. These innovations first spread southward to the Mississippi and Louisiana nations (Alabama, Caddo, Chitimacha, Houma, Natchez, Taensas, and Tunica) before moving eastward to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek. Eventually the Mississippian political, cultural, and economic networks stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Great Lakes to deep inside present-day Mexico. Cahokia was designated a World Heritage Cultural Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 1982.²

Numerous explanations have been offered for the collapse of this civilization in the 1500s: resource conflicts, warfare, overpopulation, and the spread of Spanish-introduced diseases such as smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus. Others cite the four-year quest for gold by Hernando de Soto and his six hundred soldiers between the years of 1539 and 1542. This party of mercenaries left a path of war, destruction, slavery, and disease throughout the Southeast. In 1541 Quigualtam, the Great Sun of the Natchez, ridiculed de Soto’s claim of being a deity prior to leading the Natchez and other nations in a successful campaign to expel the Spaniards. Disease, war, and colonization began a long era of social collapse and migrations. Yet the Africans who entered the region after 1700 did not meet a defeated people. They learned many lessons from the indigenous nations in subjects they too had mastered on the other side of the Atlantic: regional planning, sustainable relations with nature, and sustainable social relations. They also shared an encyclopedic knowledge of the forms of resistance, cultural preservation, and intellectual mobilizations necessary to build continental-scale multiethnic alliances. All of this indigenous knowledge and these development traditions entered into the Blues development tradition.³

The Plans of the Great Sun, the Sun King, and Samba Bambara, 1699–1765

The clash of competing development traditions in what was to become the New Orleans region began again in the late seventeenth century. Although the trade in beaver fur made Quebec a highly profitable colony for France, by the 1630s overhunting and the rising demand for beaver hats in Europe had begun to set the conditions for the French conquest of the Great Lakes region during the early 1670s. Yet the growth of British colonies along the Atlantic Seaboard and the new Spanish settlements in Florida and Texas were viewed as threats to both the fur trade and to France’s vastly more profitable sugar plantation colonies of the Caribbean: Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. In order to expand the French Empire while blocking the imperial designs of the British and Spanish, King Louis XIV, the Sun King, financed the exploration of the Mississippi Valley. In 1682 René-Robert Cavalier, the Sieur de La Salle, surveyed an arc of regions extending from Quebec to the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. Without consulting any of the indigenous nations, La Salle claimed the entire ten-million-acre Mississippi basin for France and named it Louisiana, or Louis’s land.

The new French approach to colonization and social regulation was developed by Louis XIV and his finance minister Jean Baptiste-Colbert during the 1660s. Jerah Johnson argues that they eventually realized that the English policies of enforcing conformity, limiting mobility, demonizing cultural differences, and maintaining rigid parallel hierarchies were impossible “in a realm as large and diverse as France.” Derived from the ancient Roman model of colonization, a “multicultural” assimilationist policy and plan was designed to unite ethnic, regional, economic, and feudal power centers under a single French state.

In its Augustan age the tiny city-state of Rome controlled the world less by military might than by making Rome and things Roman so grand, attractive, and easily accessible that subject peoples everywhere, though they retained their individual identities and traditions, including their own legal codes, willingly accepted, indeed vied for, participation in the glory of being Roman. Colbert and Louis XIV developed a similar program to make the glory of France such that no subject or group of subjects could resist its lure.⁴

FIGURE 1. Louisiana, 1780 (“Carte de la Louisiane, et de la Floride”), Charles Marie Rigobert Bonne. Courtesy of the Louisiana Historical Center, Louisiana State Museum.

The goal of creating a unified, state-driven national public culture—through a multicultural approach to ethnic and class management—rested on several pillars that continue to resonate in the present period: large-scale construction projects, festivals, galas, other spectacles, and an almost occult-like preoccupation with fashion, cuisine, language, and celebrity. Conversely, the English mercantilist theory of colonization was corporate driven, particularistic, and practical. It focused largely on specifics such as trade regulations and the accumulation of savings that would ensure profits for individuals and private companies. French mercantilist writers tended to be more universalistic and philosophical in outlook. They developed a colonization policy thought to be applicable to all societies at all times. The plan’s focus was much broader, more inclusive, and far more systematic than the English version. It was not insignificant that English New World explorations and colonies were mostly private ventures funded by trading companies, whereas similar French efforts were funded almost exclusively by the Crown as extensions of national enterprise.⁵

France’s colonization polices were also shaped by its experiences in Quebec and the Caribbean. To prevent rebellions, colonial authorities in Quebec encouraged intermarriage, integrated settlements, and other policies and plans designed to “gently polish” indigenous people into Frenchmen. A more robust assimilation program was developed in the 1630s by a Jesuit superior in Quebec. To protect the heavily outnumbered colonists, select indigenous nations were alienated from their holistic traditions. Catholic missionaries learned native languages to support a policy of “capturing their minds” that involved educating the young, publicly and privately displaying concern and pity, providing hospitals for those dying of European-introduced diseases, encouraging the abandonment of seasonal migrations, moving villages closer to the French forts, and encouraging the adoption of Christianity.⁶

Several historians suggest that Louisiana must be understood as part of the circum-Caribbean plantation social order. Indeed, the colony was established by a party of one hundred French hunters, farmers, pirates, soldiers, sailors, and laborers who set sail from Saint Domingue (Haiti) on the last day of 1698. France began occupying the western third of the Spanish-controlled island of Hispaniola in 1625, and Spain formally ceded the territory in 1697. French Louisiana would eventually prosper and fall due to its status as a satellite of Haiti, a country whose vast sugar plantations and large numbers of enslaved Black workers made it both the most valuable colony and the most dangerous free nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Under the leadership of Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, the Louisiana invasion force landed at present-day Biloxi, Mississippi.⁷ Alliances were soon formed with the Natchez and Chickasaw chiefs in Louisiana and Mississippi. After Iberville left the colony in 1702, his brother, Jean-Baptiste de Bienville, assumed leadership, serving as the colony’s commandant or governor during four separate periods between 1701 and 1743.⁸ The Ibervilles closely followed the multicultural colonization policy, peacefully coexisting with native people willing to become allies, constructing forts near native settlements, occupying the most fertile and sacred land (economic and cultural imposition), and resettling natives who suddenly found themselves living too close to French “installations” (displacement and enclosure). Students of history who choose to romanticize the colonial assimilation policies of the French simultaneously choose to ignore the foundations of these regimes: enclosure, genocide, and slavery. Those who resisted or allied with the British faced genocide. For example, to secure land for commercial and trade purposes, in 1706 Bienville launched a twelve-year war of extermination and enslavement against former French allies, the three thousand members of the Chitimacha nation residing southwest of New Orleans.⁹

Although the Louisiana colony was governed by the Crown from 1699 to 1712, its disorganization and destitution led Louis XIV to grant control over governance, imports, exports, Native lands, raw materials, the slave trade, and Native American relations to the merchant Antoine Crozat in 1712. Antoine Cadillac was appointed governor and soon he launched several initiatives designed to stabilize the colony: the creation of the Superior Council or city council; the adoption of a legal code; the est...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• We Made It
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• About Clyde Woods
• Foreword
• Introduction The Dialectics of Bourbonism and the Blues
• Chapter 1 I Thought I Heard Samba Bambara Say: The Social Construction of New Orleans
• Chapter 2 I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say: Reconstruction, Bourbonism, and the Jazz Renaissance Blues as Planning
• Chapter 3 Hemispheric UNIA and the Great Flood, 1915–1928
• Chapter 4 The Share the Wealth Plan: Longism, 1928-1940
• Chapter 5 The Double V Generation and the Blues Agenda, 1940–1965
• Chapter 6 The Second Reconstruction, 1965–1977: The Neo-Bourbon War on Poverty and Massive Resistance in Concrete
• Chapter 7 The Disaster before the Disaster: Oil Regimes, Plantation Economics, and the Southern Strategy, 1977-2005
• Chapter 8 The New Urban Crisis: Katrina Time and the Planned Abandonment Movement
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Credits
• Index