Further Travels

In the course of responding to the comments of Kenneth Bilby, Aisha Khan, and Deborah Thomas on Travels with Tooy, Price raises some questions suggested by the book: What is the place of long-term ethnography of the sort represented by Travelsin Caribbeanist research? How do we best think about ways of knowing (including subject positions, relationships, disciplines) in the Caribbean? How do we best think about ways of writing Caribbean culture (literary modes, social science modes), the languages needed to express what Bilby calls the “ineffable”? To what extent and in what ways are apparently exotic or marginal peoples, such as the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, truly part of the Caribbean world? While considering longstanding debates about African continuities vs. New World creativity, and discussing what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called “the miracle of creolization,” the essay draws on the history of Caribbean studies to consider possible new directions.