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.