Episode 1: Clyde Woods, Dispossession, and Resistance in New Orleans

Antipod

In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of our first season. Hosts Brian Williams and Akira Drake Rodriguez walk listeners through a series of clips from a panel on Clyde Woods’s posthomously published work Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Brian and Akira comment on the use of Woods’s “blues epistemology” framework to contextualize the ongoing making and re-making of Black geographies in New Orleans. Covering themes from dispossession to displacement to the fallacy of “natural” disasters, this episode challenges traditional notions of urban planning and privileges what Woods’s calls “the visions of the dispossessed.” Clips from this episode are from an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Community Book Center in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a space of continuity for pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans residents. The participants in the discussion were: former Woods student and activist-poet Sunni Patterson; Khalil Shahid, Senior Policy Advocate at the National Resource Defense Council; Anna Brand, Asst. Prof at the University of California at Berkeley; Shana Griffin from Jane’s Place, New Orleans’ first community land trust; Sue Mobley, who, at the time of the panel, was the Public Programs Manager for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University; and Jordan T. Camp (editor) who at the time of the panel was at Barnard College, and is now the Director of Research at the People’s Forum in New York.