Description: A "Blues geography" of New Orleans 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.
Brief description: JORDAN T. CAMP is a Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.
Review Quotes: This sensitively edited, posthumously published work of the late Clyde Woods is of major importance for anyone interested in African American history and its radical traditions. Woods provides a powerful optic for understanding the long unfolding of black freedom movements across time, while also explaining the persistent reinvention and re-institutionalization of spatial and economic strategies of racial dominance. Insistently claiming the social life that has been made on the horns of white supremacy, Woods reminds us that the radical Reconstruction agenda remains unfulfilled--that even as racial despotism has demonstrated resilience and capacity for reinvention, so too has the 'Blues tradition' of struggle. The dialectic continues.--Nikhil Pal Singh, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University "and author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy"