Remembering Clyde Woods

In the 2009 special issue he guest edited, In the Wake of Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, the extraordinary scholar Clyde Woods wrote about New Orleans: "Brilliance often flashes brightly, just as suddenly disappears, and then reappears decades later. To understand the region, the reader will have to explore the subterranean caverns that shelter the wellsprings of dreams during the seasons when hope can't be found." On July 6, 2011, Dr. Woods passed away, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship, inspiration, and hope. His brilliance, like New Orleans, flashes brightly; his work remains as a map of those "subterranean caverns," lighting us back to the "wellsprings of dreams" where hope will continue to be nourished. Among many other things, he was also a member of the managing board, a scholar of the blues, and an academic both studying and organizing social and cultural justice, and forms of political resistance. His book, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi, is a beacon and powerful treatise on Black music and the social, economic, and political contexts that both nurture and restrain cultural forms like the blues. Before he died, Clyde continued to work for social and cultural justice in the United States, Haiti, and elsewhere. He will be missed.

In the words of his colleagues and friends, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (City University of New York), Laura Pulido (University of Southern California), and Gaye Theresa Johnson (University of California Santa Barbara):

We are devastated to report the passing of Clyde Adrian Woods (January 17, 1957-July 6, 2011). The urgent questions he raised for scholarship on Black life are of a piece with how he conducted himself as a scholar of Black life. Trained in geography and urban planning, he taught in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Clyde was theoretically innovative, empirically fearless, creatively interdisciplinary, and committed to the dignity and liberation of all oppressed peoples. Dr. Woods's "blues epistemology" is a guide to discovering not only counternarratives but also alternative development visions. His generosity, particularly with students, is legendary, as is the breadth of his projects. At the time of his death, our beloved colleague was working on several manuscripts that a number of us will try to complete, both to honor his memory and to augment his substantial impact on American studies.

This issue of American Quarterly ushers in the launch of our new website, americanquarterly.org. The result of the advisory and managing boards of the journal, as well as the creative staff at Johns Hopkins University Press, the new website is composed of several new features, each intended to foster community and dialogue among American studies scholars. The new "Interact" section features a link to "Beyond the Page," which is the journal's new supplementary web page that allows authors to include clips, images, and other media materials to accompany their published articles. This will be a permanent feature of the journal, launched with the publication of the special issue, "Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies," guest edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun. "Interact" also offers "Teaching Tools," which will feature a past contributor's work, complete with a link to the author's article and a teaching template that offers suggestions for how to incorporate the article into the classroom. "Join the Conversation" is our effort to stimulate intellectual dialogue among readers by featuring articles with space for members to comment and interact with each other. Finally, "AQ Then and Now" is a feature that pairs a journal article published in years past with a current one on a similar topic as a way to encourage us to see historical links between and within our scholarship.

Within this issue of American Quarterly, the authors use visual, performance, literary, and media archives and analyses to consider the development and relevance of identity to the nation-state form, as well as how these social and political categories exceed nation-state framing. To that end, this issue offers colonial seals, romance novel sheikhs, Black radicals, "bearded women," and female impersonators as sites to consider. David Kazanjian considers...