richard price & sally price

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990

"A Rebel Negro armed & on his guard," engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi

J.I. Staley and R.P.

Alabi's World

Winner of the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award, the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship, and the J. I. Staley Prize in Anthropology

Expanding the possibilities of historical writing, this multivocal narrative invites the reader to participate directly in the act of historical imagination. Richard Price is an expert guide through these first-hand accounts -- as white colonists strain to suppress black culture, and blacks resist, determined to create and preserve their own distinctly African American lifeways.

"Price has chosen a subject equally important to historians and social anthropologists, quite apart from the heroism of the Maroons' struggle. For Maroon societies raise fundamental questions. How do casual collections of fugitives of widely different origins possessing nothing in common but the experience of transportation in slave ships and of plantation slavery, come to form structured communities? How, one might say more generally, are societies founded from scratch? ... A splendid effort to recover the past."
--E.J. Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books

“A virtuosic display of scholarship, erudition and imagination by noted ethno-anthropologist Price. Recounts through the interweaving of four distinct voices (set in four type styles) the way 18th-century Saramakas and whites, at the end of a very long war, developed routines, rituals, and institutions that allowed them to live side-by-side in peace. A tour de force.”
-–Booknews

"Some scenes have been written so vividly and offer so much detail that afterwards one cannot be certain whether one has seen the movie or read the book."
--Journal of Latin American Studies

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Selected Books:

Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination
Winner of the 2008 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, the 2009 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship, and the 2009 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. . . . "An astonishing performance ... as lucid and cordial as the best contemporary fiction.”--George Lamming
Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly
"A delicious combination of art, anthropology, and politics"--Lucy R. Lippard
Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension
A lavishly-illustrated art book
Les Marrons
A French-language original, printed in full color.
Maroon Arts
"A tour-de-force ... a true marriage of anthropology and art history." --Fred Myers, New York University
Primitive Art in Civilized Places
"A witty, but scholarly, indictment of the whole primitive art business." --Newsweek
The Convict and The Colonel
"A superb calaloo of a book ... that explores the underlying insanity of the colonial experience." --George Lamming
Enigma Variations: A Novel
"A true gem... The promise of literary ethnography is fulfilled: to educate and, just as a lark, to entertain." --African Arts
First-Time: The Historical Vision of an African American People
"Sensitive and honest, First-Time is required reading for all who seek to learn something new through first-hand, long-term research with non-western intellectuals" --Ethnohistory
Alabi's World
"A splendid effort to recover the past." --New York Review of Books
Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas
"A splendid anthology, skillfully edited and introduced." --Eugene D. Genovese
The Birth of African-American Culture
"An innovative analysis of the creativity of African-Americans under the extreme constraints of slavery." --Rebecca Scott
Co-Wives and Calabashes
"Conceived with sophistication but presented with simplicity and clarity" --Choice
Equatoria
"A brilliantly crafted experiment in postmodern narration --J. Jorge Klor de Alva, president, University of Phoenix
Two Evenings in Saramaka
As seas dry up, books speak out loud, and elephants assume human form, we are present at a whole sequence of world-shaping happenings such as the invention of sex, the discovery of drums,and the arrival of death among humans.
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