Richard Price Research Articles

Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa. By Richard Price (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008) 371 pp. $99.00 cloth $36.99 paper

<i>Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa</i>. By Richard Price (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008) 371 pp. $99.00 cloth $36.99 paper

On the Slogans of Republican Political Theory

All the contributors to this symposium have their own particular thesis to defend, but they are united at the same time by their concern with a single overarching theme. They are all interested in extending what they describe as a ‘republican’ view of freedom and equality to encompass broader questions about human rights and the proper relations between states. I mainly want to comment on this attempt to expand the reach of republican political thought. But I also want to focus – more explicitly than any of our symposiasts have done – on the intellectual traditions from which they draw their sustenance, thereby seeking to illuminate what it might mean to describe their shared outlook as republican in provenance. Suppose we begin by recalling some of the classic statements of republican political theory from the heyday of the tradition in early-modern Europe. Consider, for example, Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discorsi, written in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512. Or consider some of the English writers most heavily indebted to Machiavelli, such as James Harrington in his Oceana of 1656, or Algernon Sydney in his Discourses on Government of 1694, or such later theorists as Richard Price in his Observations on Civil Liberty of 1776. It would not, I think, be too much of an oversimplification to say that the common features of the republicanism espoused by all these writers arose out of two basic commitments. Furthermore, as the republican tradition developed, these underlying principles came to be summarized in the form of two slogans, as I shall call them, that may almost be said to define the republican case. It is with these slogans and their implications that I shall mainly be concerned in what follows.

Does Humanity Share a Common Moral Faculty?

AbstractThe history of ethics contains many moral faculty theories, which usually are sorted by their metaphysics. The usual suspects include moral rationalism (Richard Price, Kant), moral sentiment theory (Hutcheson, Hume, Smith) and the varieties of ethical naturalism. Moral faculty theories differ importantly upon yet another dimension, on how widely it is distributed. Some, the Platonic elitists (Plato, J.S. Mill, R.M. Hare), suppose that moral truth can be discerned only by philosophical argument. Hence, they ascribe a revisionary task to normative theory, that of correcting nonphilosophers' moral errors. Others, the communalists (Aquinas, Hume, W.D. Ross), hold that the moral faculty is universally distributed. Hence, they hold that normative theory's task is not to revise, but rather to discern and explain the shared moral conception that we all apply in our ordinary moral lives. I here offer arguments to support commonalism.

Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination Catherine Reinhardt Richard Price. 2008. Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xiv + 452 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68059-0, ISBN-10: 0-226-68059-2. Travels with Tooy is an exceptional ethnographic study of Saramaka maroon cosmology, healing practices and contemporary negotiations of life in a former French colony. The work is groundbreaking in terms of both content and form. The archival wealth resulting from Richard Price’s long-standing friendship with Tooy Alexander, one of the best-known Saramaka curers, beginning in 2000 combined with 35 years of experience with the Saramaka people of French Guiana and Suriname is an anthropological treasure trove. The text, consisting principally of conversations between Price and Tooy is further complemented and expanded with extensive notes and a coda of esoteric language. Beyond the impressive primary source material, what is even more exceptional about Travels with Tooy is Price’s unique ability to adopt the Saramaka world view in his writing style. Price communicates not only information about Saramakas but also a way of being Saramakan through the very textuality of his writing. Coming from a literary and cultural studies background myself, I will primarily focus on Price’s unique writing style. The book is divided into something one might equate to journal entries headed by a title and generally also by a date or a date span. Oftentimes the dates are realistic and represent an actual date either from a past century or from the present day. Other times the dates are a series of zeros when the journal entry pertains to the Saramaka gods, in particular the sea gods. The dates are a key element helping the reader navigate from century to century as Price’s and Tooy’s stories of the Saramakas intermingle and gradually unfold. The book begins at the beginning, in a sense, recounting the search for a Saramaka healer to cure a Martinican businessman and gamecock breeder which brings together Price and Tooy and begins their friendship and collaboration. However, as Price already explains on the second page, this situation is far from simple and plunges all the characters in the story, along with the reader, in the heart of a fantastic adventure: What a tangle! How to reconcile personal and professional ethics while trying to bridge the various worlds we inhabit. How to suspend certain kinds of disbelief while holding on to others, never forgetting [End Page 204] the inextricable links that bind modernity to magic in our present world. We are plunged into the middle of a very Caribbean imbroglio, with tentacles stretching from Haiti to Trinidad—and now to the descendants of escaped slaves in the tropical forest of Suriname, whose fame as conjurers radiates all the way to Martinique and beyond. On balance, it seems like too good a story—and too good a way of tying together the strands of our own lives—not to see how it will play out. I take the bait and promise Roland to make some phone calls and find an appropriate specialist (pp. 2–3). These few sentences foreshadow what will follow in the next 300 hundred pages. “Imbroglio” perfectly qualifies the narrative that strives to reflect the historical, social and geo-political reality of the Caribbean, both past and present. Throughout the story, the author’s writing shadows Tooy as he continuously bridges various worlds “between centuries, continents, the visible and invisible, and the worlds of the living and the dead” (p. xi). It is the relationship between these different worlds that nourishes his Dúnguláli-Óbia rites (the power that protects against Death). The fact that he can directly trace his ancestry to escaped slaves is perhaps the focal point that connects the tentacles reaching throughout the Caribbean basin, but also all the way to Africa several centuries back. Perhaps the most important key to reading Travels with Tooy is the necessity of suspending certain kinds of belief while remembering the inextricable links binding our contemporary modern world to magic. While North American and European readers may approach this book...

Bookshelf 2009

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price

Editing Creativity: Journals and the University Creative Writing Program

Once, late in the hot afternoon of a summer day, I looked up from a set of manuscripts to find a stranger leaning against the doorframe. His name was Richard Price, and he’d come to write a magazine article on an aspect of the university’s athletic program. In his off time, he wanted to see the offices of the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner. I was pleased to meet Price, whose novels I’d read and liked. He and my family spent an evening together, drinking beer and eating pizza, talking about wrestling, a passion our grandmothers shared. We of the next generations seemed to like to wrestle text. In fact, my passion for editing was one response to the difficult times we discussed. History, I suggested, offers little control to its human witnesses, maybe only the power of retrospective analysis. But art seemed to invite immediate human response. I’d come to believe that we editors, if we worked hard enough, might see some of our writers grow to be famous, as Price was about to become. The family stories we told were an act of friendly exchange. But the occasion for our meeting was very much a by-product of the intensive work of literary publishing, an active collaboration between creative writers and editors that brings art to its audience. Price knew about Prairie Schooner just as we knew about Price.

Travels with Tooy: History, Memory and the African American Imagination by Richard Price

Travels with Tooy: History, Memory and the African American Imagination by Richard Price

J. D. Bowers . Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America . University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press . 2007 . Pp. xiv, 282. $50.00.

For generations, historians have insisted that the roots of Unitarianism lie in the liberal wing of late colonial Puritan Congregationalism. In the background are New England pastors such as Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew, while the movement took more formal identity with a well-known sermon preached by New Englander William Ellery Channing in 1819. His “What Is Unitarian Christianity?” gave the movement a name as it claimed a place for this nascent denomination within the Christian family. J. D. Bowers demurs. In this study of the English Unitarian tradition, particularly as expressed by theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, Bowers insists that multiple strands fed into emerging American Unitarianism. Priestley's version is also significant, if not more central, to those developments. When Priestley arrived in the United States in 1794, English Unitarianism had already crafted a place for itself in the dissenting landscape in Britain. Some early English Unitarians communicated with New England liberal Congregationalists. Richard Price, for example, corresponded extensively with Chauncy.

Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination by Richard Price

Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination by Richard Price

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. By Jeffrey J. Kripal

Esalen. For those familiar with new and alternative spiritual and psychological practices in North America, the word has an almost mythic resonance. Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard (Dick) Price, located near Big Sur on the rugged California coast 45 miles south of Monterey, the Esalen Institute was the epicenter of the human potential movement, the place from which thousands of men and women charted the centrifugal and centripetal forces of spiritual, sexual, chemical, psychological, and, underpinning all, experiential exploration and experimentation. In Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, historian of religions Jeffrey Kripal traces the story of Esalen mainly through the people who created and recreated it over the course of four decades, as well as through the programs, workshops, and seminars they organized to facilitate their search. Many of the principal actors are well known: psychologist Abraham Maslow, whom Kripal considers central to “early Esalen vision” (135); psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who pioneered “gestalt therapy”; Stanislav and Christina Grof, among the founders of transpersonal psychology; mythographer Joseph Campbell, who celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday at Esalen (188); George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, who played his sitar on Esalen's front lawn (107). Others are less well known (at least in terms of their association with Esalen): Henry Miller, who left Paris for Big Sur in the mid-1940s and for many years occupied one of the cabins near the (in)famous baths (35–40); Hunter S. Thompson, the guru of gonzo journalism, who was hired in 1961 to guard the Esalen property shortly after Murphy and Price purchased it, but for whom the birthplace of the human potential movement was simply one more brief stop on a manic road trip through life (94–96); and Monty Python alum John Cleese, whom Kripal calls “an Esalen aficionado” (443). Organized in eight parts comprising 20 chapters, in many ways the book resists a straight-through read, Kripal's vignette style of writing instead encouraging a more opportunistic approach, scanning the index and dipping in where one notes the presence of a particularly interesting (or notorious) character, program, or event.

Travels with Anthropology

This article reflects upon Richard Price's newest work, Travels with Tooy. In it, the author argues that the book - on the surface, a text about the transmission of esoteric knowledge passed down from “First Time” to the present among Saramaka Maroons - is actually an investigation of the role of anthropological knowledge within Caribbean Studies. As such, Travels opens a window on the anthropological contribution to more general debates about nation-building throughout the circum-Caribbean. The author tracks anthropology's disciplinary history vis-à-vis the Caribbean in order to explore some of the roads not traveled within Travels. This is done to highlight the ways issues emerge and change across generational cohorts of researchers. The author concludes by arguing that anthropology's continued relevance to Caribbean Studies depends on rethinking some of our main areas of focus and methods of engagement.

African American Memory at the Crossroads: Grounding the Miraculous with Tooy

Richard Price’s Travels with Tooy culminates with a series of reflections on a fundamental fissure that has persisted in the theorization of African American culture. On one side are those who stress African cultural continuity of various kinds, and on the other, those who argue for the primacy of cultural dynamism, creativity and change. Drawing on ethnographic and philosophical insights gained from his close engagement with the book’s protagonist, a Saramaka Maroon healer, Price seeks to transcend (if not nullify) the terms of the “hoary debate” kept alive by these opposed “camps.” This essay agrees with Price’s argument against the starkly opposed positions of the past, but proposes that it may be too early to lay this continuing debate entirely to rest. Using music as a point of departure, it argues that experiential understandings that privilege cultural continuity, if properly contextualized, remain valuable, if not indispensable.

Catching the Wind

In this essay I explore key tropes in the study of the Caribbean and New World African diasporas, focusing on the work of Richard Price, and, in particular, Travels With Tooy. I engage some problematic issues in the definition and apprehension of memory, history, and cultural transformation (creolization). These issues include the constitution of “knowledge” and “evidence,” the value and meaning of empirical research, the relationship between the construction of experience and the construction of a discipline, and the ways that authority and legitimacy are established and maintained. The essay ends by briefly considering what the stakes are in the contemporary debate about memory, history, and cultural transformation in diaspora, and thus, consequently, what political projects are embedded in them.

Bridging the Real and the Ideal in International Ethics

Richard Price's new volume, Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics, is the latest contribution to what Steve Smith called, in 1992, the “resurgence” of normative theorizing in International Relations (Smith 1992). Over a decade and a half later, that resurgence is stronger than ever, as IR scholars from an array of different theoretical and methodological stripes continue to weigh in on “ethics” and “ethical issues” in world politics. This new book, however, is a particularly valuable contribution to that conversation for at least two reasons: first, because it addresses international ethics from the perspective of “constructivism,” an increasingly popular theoretical approach which, in some forms, can speak to the American “mainstream” of the discipline; and second, because of its provocative yet crucial central argument regarding the need to understand the limits and possibilities for moral change through careful empirical analysis. The main aim of the volume is to demonstrate—both theoretically and through the use of specific cases—the contribution of constructivist approaches to understanding the role and influence of morality in world politics. Tied to this, however, is the more defensive aim of the contributors—especially the book's editor—of answering the charge that the constructivist literature in International Relations has failed to engage fully with “global ethics,” instead limiting itself to analyses of the causal role of “norms,” especially in influencing foreign policy. To this end, chapters one and two, by Price and Christian Reus-Smit, respectively, set out the main theoretical and methodological arguments of the book. The remaining chapters, written by an excellent collection of both junior and established constructivist scholars, tackle the “real life” ethical dilemmas in world politics, including sanctions, humanitarian intervention, gender equality and multiculturalism, and the recognition of indigenous peoples.

Yeats, “Leda,” and the Aesthetics of To-Morrow : “The Immortality of the Soul”

Yeats, “Leda,” and the Aesthetics of To-Morrow: “The Immortality of the Soul” Bernard McKenna In August 1924, a small literary magazine, To-Morrow, went on sale in Dublin. As its title implies, the magazine’s editors, Francis Stuart and Cecil Salkeld, were buoyed with optimism.1 They hoped for a new cultural movement in the arts that would parallel its development and, in turn, influence the newly founded Irish Free State. The young editors felt that “mainstream Irish literature was narrow and that no outlets were available for young writers to publish innovative or experimental work; nor was there a forum for the discussion of developments in poetry, painting, and philosophy.”2 In early 1924, Stuart and his friends had decided to launch To-Morrow: They approached such well-known writers as Lennox Robinson and Liam O’Flaherty for stories, plus their friends Joseph Campbell and F. R. Higgins, who contributed poems, and O’Flaherty’s mistress, Margaret Barrington, who offered a short story.3 After some trouble with a Dublin printer over Robinson’s story, the group had the journal printed in Manchester. Its first issue was well received, but after its second issue in September 1924, political pressures prevented the magazine from appearing again. This was not uncommon; as David Miller and Richard Price note, “Ireland in the 1920s and 30s when seen through the lens of the literary magazine is a country where immense . . . creative forces are faced and faced off by a sensitive and censoring emergent state.”4 The editors of To-Morrow did not shrink from confronting the sensitivities of the new nation. Indeed, [End Page 16] they hoped to confront, expose, and change the more restrictive of those sensibilities, while advancing a program for a new cultural movement. To-Morrow’s editors specifically hoped to start a cultural revolution with Ireland as a base that could stand against both restrictive versions of spirituality—a rigid Catholicism, and such contemporary, secular artistic movements as Cubism, which Stuart and Salkeld viewed as spiritually destructive. The journal’s historical context in part explains the editors’ sense of mission. The early days of the Free State were also infused with optimism. Ireland had its own seat in the League of Nations, with the right to an “independent policy line.”5 In addition, the Irish Civil War had ended, and to celebrate the peaceful new nation, the Free State government relaunched the “Tailteann Festival,” designed to commemorate Irish culture, atheltics, and artisanship. However, the new nation seemed less focused on defining herself than on “self-definition against Britain,” on the institutionalization of a rigorous religious conservatism, and on the maintenance of a ruthlessly self-reliant economic policy.6 To-Morrow expressed the optimism of the new nation and stood against a self definition based in restrictive conceptualizations of religious, political, and material ideologies. 7 William Butler Yeats, as a Free State senator, also tried to curb the restrictive nature of the new nation. As a recent Nobel laureate, he took a prominent role in literary and cultural affairs, actively encouraging the founders of To-Morrow by contributing, under Stuart’s and Salkeld’s names, an editorial and offering “Leda and the Swan” for publication in the new “little magazine.” On June 21, 1924,Yeats wrote “in high spirits” to Olivia Shakespear, foreseeing “an admirable row.” Yeats “heard that a group of Dublin poets . . .were about to publish a review.”8 He suggested they found themselves “on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul”: [End Page 17] They had adopted my suggestion and were suppressed by the printers for blasphemy. I got a bottle of Sparkling Moselle, which I hope youthful ignorance mistook for champagne, and we swore alliance. . . . I saw a proof sheet marked by the printer. . . . My dream is a wild paper of the young which will make enemies everywhere and suffer suppression, I hope a number of times, with the logical assertion, with all fitting deductions, of the immortality of the soul.9 Yeats’s letter reveals both that the editors of To-Morrow expected to encounter hostility from the religious hegemony they hoped to challenge, and that Yeats had faith in the magazine’s...

&lt;em&gt;Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century South Africa&lt;/em&gt;, by Richard Price

&lt;em&gt;Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century South Africa&lt;/em&gt;, by Richard Price

&lt;i&gt;British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of “Little Magazines”&lt;/i&gt;, David Miller and Richard Price, comps.

&lt;i&gt;British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of “Little Magazines”&lt;/i&gt;, David Miller and Richard Price, comps.

Bookshelf 2008

A selection of books reviewed by Richard and Sally Price.

British Poetry Magazines, 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of "Little Magazines.". David Miller , Richard Price

Previous articleNext article No AccessBOOK REVIEWSBritish Poetry Magazines, 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of "Little Magazines.". David Miller , Richard Price William BakerWilliam Baker Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 102, Number 4DECEMBER 2008 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.102.4.24293700 Views: 5Total views on this site COPYRIGHT © 2008 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Travels with Tooy: history, memory, and the African American imagination

Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, anthropologist Richard Price encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With an innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship, Travels with Tooy recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals. Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world's money supply. This enchanting book draws on Price's long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy's teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.