Russell G. Pearce

Book Review Symposium

I would like to thank Clyde Adrian Woods for conducting the work that has brought us together today. Second, I would like to offer my gratitude to Laura Pulido and Jordan Camp for assuming the role of “midwives” of this book and for taking on the intellectual and emotional heft to bring it to fruition (Camp and Pulido 2017a: xvii). Third, I express my gratitude for the invitation to join in this conversation. My response to Development Drowned and Reborn will be personal, methodological, and political. In so doing, the threads I follow may meander, but hopefully in productive ways. My purpose is to show how tracking, to quote Laura and Jordan, “what Clyde was thinking and where he might have been going” (2017: xviii) helps me think and validates what I choose to think about. As I read Development Drowned and Reborn I was struck by Clyde’s deep engagement with history and historical methods. Clyde unearths long histories of the exploitation of Black working-class and Indigenous communities, and the unique development traditions each formed throughout Louisiana. In form, Clyde’s work is a model for how to study and make use of multiple archives. The text is daring in the sense that geographers are often not trained or prepared – in the affective sense of anticipating the feel, the sound, and the look of an archive – to conduct such research. However, to engage in the rich regional geographies in which Clyde saw import, we must learn to approach these hallowed halls of partial knowledge. I say “partial” because Clyde also shows us that there are archives of knowledge absent from academic