Muddy foil: a history of extraction and resistance in the lower Mississippi River Delta

ABSTRACT

This article considers Mississippi River Mud as an analytic for unruly ontologies and fugitive spaces. Historic discourses around mud—and by extension, muddy spaces—were mapped onto lawless, not-fully-humans who occupied them. They reflected efforts to impose rational order and naturalize a political economy of monoculture, river shipping, and fossil fuels. This episteme, which reduces complex ecologies to agents of capital extraction, has transformed the once alluvial forests and marshlands of south Louisiana into subsiding oil and gas fields, abandoned wells, and eroding canals. An explication of mud by communication scholars ruptures this discourse in imagining alternative ways of living.

KEYWORDS:

• Mississippi River
• mud
• environmental studies
• racialization
• extraction

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Patrick Anderson of University of California San Diego for his guidance and support of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane's Monroe Fellowship.

Notes

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3 Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast: 2012 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2012), Appendix B, 40, https://coastal.la.gov/2012-coastal-master-plan/.

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6 Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, ed. Michel Senellart, trans Graham Burchell (Pantheon Books, 1980), 81.

7 E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain […] (London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1843); Rodney James Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

8 Craig Colten, “Basin Street Blues: Drainage and Environmental Equity in New Orleans, 1890–1930,” Journal of Historical Geography 28, no. 2 (2002): 237–57.

9 Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando De Soto to Hurricane Katrina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); David P. Muth, “The Once and Future Delta,” in Perspectives on the Restoration of the Missippi Delta, eds. John W. Day et al. (New York: Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg, 2014), 9–28.

10 John R. Swanton, “Hernando De Sotos Route through Arkansas,” American Antiquity 18, no. 2 (1952): 156; Morris, The Big Muddy.

11 Morris, The Big Muddy.

12 John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Ned Randolph, “River Activism, ‘Levees-Only’ and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927,” Media and Communication 6, no. 1 (2018): 43–51; Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Toronto: Musson, 1883; Project Gutenberg, 2006, last updated 2018), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm.

13 Christine A. Klein and Sandra Beth Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

14 Craig Colten, Perilous Place, Powerful Storms: City at Risk (Oxford, UK: University of Mississippi, 2009).

15 J. O. Wright, Swamp and Overflowed Lands in the United States: Ownership and Reclamation, US Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations, Circular 76 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907).

16 Dave Tell, Remembering Emmett Till (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 12.

17 Barry, Rising Tide.

18 “Human Dike Used to Hold Back Flood: Negroes Lie on Top of Weaking Levee and Save Day near Greenville, Miss,” New York Times, April 11, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1912/04/11/archives/human-dike-used-to-hold-back-flood-negroes-lie-on-top-of-weakening.html.

19 Ibid.

20 Matthew T. Pearcy, “After the Flood: A History of the 1928 Flood Control Act,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 95, no. 2 (2002): 172–201.

21 John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 7.

22 Harold N. Fisk, “Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River” (US Army Corps of Engineers: Vicksburg, MS, 1944), 20, https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_70640.htm.

23 Mark Neuzil, The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 42.

24 Rami E. Kremesti, Silt—Clay—Mud—Sand—Soil: What Is The Difference? http://kremesti.com/water/silt_clay_mud.htm (accessed April 1, 2020).

25 P. A. Keddy et al., “The Wetlands of Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas: Past, Present and Future,” Environmental Reviews 15 (2007): 54, 43–77; Day et al., “The Once and Future Delta.”

26 Richard Campanella, “Mapping and Interpreting the Human Geography of New Orleans,” Le Monde des cartes (2010).

27 J. David Rogers, Gordon Boutwell, Conor Watkins, and Deniz Karadeniz, “Geology of the New Orleans Region,” in Investigation of the Performance of the New Orleans Flood Protection Systems in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 (Berkeley, CA: Independent Levee Investigation Team, 2006), https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=cenv_fac.

28 P. F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 2008).

29 “The Beginnings of the Capuchin Mission in Louisiana,” United States Catholic Historical Society 2, no. 7 (1888): 298.

30 Ibid., 94.

31 J.D. Rogers, “Development of the New Orleans Flood Protection System Prior to Hurricane Katrina,” Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering 134, no. 5 (2008): 602.

32 Richard Campanella, “A Look Back at New Orleans’ 300-Year-Long Drainage Drama,” Times-Picayune, August 22, 2018, https://www.nola.com/expo/life-and-culture/erry-2018/08/790f1ed00f4886/a-year-after-the-aug-5-flood-a.html.

33 Federal Writers’ Project, New Orleans City Guide, written and compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the City of New Orleans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 17.

34 Ibid, 12.

35 George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 622.

36 Richard Campanella, “Disaster and Response in an Experiment Called New Orleans, 1700s–2000s,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, March 2016).

37 Federal Writers’ Project, New Orleans City Guide, 17.

38 Ibid., 17.

39 Mel Leavitt, A Short History of New Orleans (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1982), 97.

40 Federal Writers’ Project, New Orleans City Guide, 15.

41 Ibid., 17.

42 Ibid., XIX.

43 Rodney James Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 108.

44 Ibid., 109.

45 David Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in 19th Century American Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

46 Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands, 119.

47 Brad Steiger, The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings (Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2012), 398.

48 Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands, 105.

49 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. 1990), 4.

50 Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands, 217.

51 William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967), 335.

52 Miller, Dark Eden, 96.

53 Richard Grant, “Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom: The Great Dismal Swamp was Once a Thriving Refuge For Runaways,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/.

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56 Bruce Eggler, “FEMA Archeologists Find American Indian Pottery, Other Items by Bayou St. John,” Times-Picayune, February 21, 2013, https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_538a51a4-04ed-5ffb-a02d-c526e698ff39.html.

57 Cynthia Lejeune Nobles, “Gumbo,” in New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories, eds. Susan Tucker and Frederick S. Starr (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 98–115.

58 Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press 2014), 7.

59 Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 8.

60 Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Hall, Gwendolyn Midlow Hall, “San Malo Maroons,” Paper Monuments Project #010, New Orleans Historical, https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1403 (accessed June 16, 2019).

61 “Louisiana Advertiser of the 8th,” The Liberator, July 2, 1836, America’s Historical Newpapers.

62 Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States,” The Journal of Negro History 24, no. 2 (1939): 180.

63 Ibid., 182.

64 Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles.

65 Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands; Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition.

66 Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands.

67 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Snellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21.

68 J. H. Bauer, “Yellow Fever,” Public Health Reports (1896–1970) 55, no. 9 (1940): 362–71.

69 Ibid.; Giblett, Post Modern Wetlands.

70 Campanella, Disaster and Response.

71 Ibid.

72 Edward J. Blum, “The Crucible of Disease: Trauma, Memory, and National Reconciliation During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878,” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 4 (2003): 791–820.

73 Barry, Rising Tide.

74 John Ellis, “The Epidemic of 1878,” Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South, 1st ed. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 53.

75 Blum, “Crucible of a Disease,” 799.

76 John H. Ellis, “The New Orleans Sanitary Association,” in Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 84.

77 Ibid., 85.

78 Colten, Basin Street Blues, 30.

79 Ibid.

80 Sheldon Watts, “Yellow Fever, Malaria and Development: Atlantic Africa and the New World, 1647 to 1928,” in Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 213–68; Bauer, “Yellow Fever.”

81 Bauer, “Yellow Fever,” 366.

82 Campanella, “A Look Back.”

83 Ari Kelman, “Boundary Issues: Clarifying New Orleans’ Murky Edges,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 695–703.

84 Colten, “Basin Street Blues,” 239.

85 Ibid.

86 Lewis, Urban Landscape.

87 Richard Campanella, Above Sea Level New Orleans: The Residential Capacity of Orleans Parish’s Higher Ground, eds. Douglas J. Meffert (New Orleans, LA: The Center for Bioenvironmental Research, April 2007), 2, http://richcampanella.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/study_Campanella%20analysis%20on%20Above-Sea-Level%20New%20Orleans.pdf.

88 Campanella, “A Look Back.”

89 Ibid.

90 Steven Jackson, “Building the Virtual River: Numbers, Models, and the Politics of Water in California,” (PhD dissertation, University of California San Diego, 2005); James T. B. Tripp and Michael Herz, “Wetland Preservation and Restoration: Changing Federal Priorities,” Virginia Journal of Natural Resources Law 7, no. 2 (1988); Jason P. Theriot, American Energy, Imperiled Coast: Oil and Gas Development in Louisiana’s Wetlands (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2014).

91 Theriot, American Energy; Oliver A. Houck, “The Reckoning: Oil and Gas Development in the Louisiana Coastal Zone,” Tulane Environmental Law Journal 28, no. 2 (2015).

92 Lewis M. Cowardin, Virginia Carter, Francis C. Golet, and Edward T. LaRoe, “Classification of Wetlands and Deepwater Habitats of the United States,” FWS/OBS-79/31 (Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, December 1979), 3, https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/documents/Classification-of-Wetlands-and-Deepwater-Habitats-of-the-United-States.pdf.

93 Cowardin et al., “Classification of Wetlands,” 2.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid., 3.

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid., iii.

98 Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast: 2017 (Baton Rouge, LA: OTS-State Printing, 2017), https://coastal.la.gov/our-plan/2017-coastal-master-plan/.

99 Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan; Randolph, “License to Extract.”

100 Escobar, “Constructing Nature”; World Commission on Environment and Development, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).

101 Escobar, “Constructing Nature,” 328.

102 Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan.

103 Toby Miller, Greenwashing Culture (London: Routledge, 2018); Chris John, “Oil and Gas Industry has Louisiana’s Intersts at Heart,” Nola.com, August 1, 2013, https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_9eb60b41-baab-5dca-9cff-a4ff72169a1e.html; Randolph, License to Extract; Miller, Greenwashing Culture.

104 Randal W. Peterson, Giants on the River: A Story of Chemistry and the Industrial Development on the Lower Mississippi River Corridor (Baton Rouge, LA: Homesite Company, 2000).

105 Randolph, License to Extract.

106 Old River Control Structure, Louisiana: Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committe on Appropriations, 96th Cong., 2nd sess., December 22, 1980.

107 Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan.