Development Arrested: Race, Power and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta - Hardcover

Woods, Clyde

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859848117 ISBN 13: 9781859848111

Publisher: Verso, 1998

Synopsis

Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the two-centuries-old conflict between the African Americans and planters in the Mississippi Delta. Woods traces the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debates, showing the ways in which African Americans in the Delta have continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice despite having suffered countless defeats under the planter regime. Woods interweaves the role of music in sustaining their efforts, surveying a musical tradition that embraced a radical vision of social change.

About this title

About the Author

Clyde Woods is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Review

“[A] stunning and fresh analysis of the political economy of white supremacy and the redemptive power of the blues. All Americans, especially students, scholars, general readers and policy makers, who care about the extension of democracy and the future of black freedom, should read and discuss Clyde Wood’s intriguing book.”—Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America

“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, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

“Woods should be applauded for pointing out the absurdity of a situation in which, for instance, whole families—made obsolete my machinery, genetic research, and high yield fertilizers—are allowed to starve within eyeshot of fields that government pay affluent farmers to leave fallow.”—Oxford American

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1859848117
• ISBN 13: 9781859848111
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 342