Clyde Woods: A Synthesis Essay

As a scholar of Black life, Clyde Woods is strongly interested in topics related to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermaths to the black communities. His devoted research is to bring readers to the answer to “a raging global debate over the Bush administration’s views on racial justice,” (1006) in “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” an article aptly named after an iconic New Orleans song. He was innovative, and committed to the identity politics, dignity and liberation of all oppressed peoples. Using "blues epistemology" as a medium to discover not only counter narratives but also alternative development visions. He claimed that “the Katrina tragedy was a blues moment” (1006) because it revealed the “absence of social justice and
The blues genre is considered at the root of all other black musical styles and it reflects the quintessential expression of a marginalized, subaltern people. In many other works by Woods, the refinement of blues music is used as critique, as news, and as remembrance, as a mode of political and social survival for the subordinated. For example, in his Development Arrested, the blues epistemology is developed as “sociologists, reporters, counsellors, advocates, preservers of language and customs, and summons’s of life” (1998: 17) . He contributed to the gaps to see “the new regional social and spatial foundations of post-civil rights racism: suburban residential and industrial re-segregation; massive state investment in predominantly white areas; massive state disinvestment from rural and urban areas with large African American, Native American, Latino populations; the triumph of the state’s rights movement; the fracturing of any semblance of national social policy; and so on. By first understanding the central role of race in the [spatial] restructuring process at the regional level, we can then trace how dominant regional blocs use race to reorder national and international realities” (2002: 64). He argued for “new epistemologies, theories, methods, policies, programs, and plans for communities confronted by the…neo-Bourbon/neoliberal agenda” (2009: 448). He suggests that to understand a place, we “have to explore the subterranean caverns that shelter the wellsprings of dreams during the seasons when hope can’t be found” (2009: 430). For Woods, the blues epistemology was one of the ways to find the cracks in the castle of power through which people might find open spaces for social change, even if such change is hard to achieve and slow to