The Convict and the Colonel [Paperback]

Richard Price (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807046515 | ISBN-13: 978-0807046517 | Publication Date: November 1, 1998

The life of Medard Aribot of Martinique óartist, convict, madman, legend óspans much of the twentieth century. Born in 1901 when slavery was a living memory, Medard was allegedly sent to a French penal colony for carving a bust of a colonial official that rioters hoisted overhead during a 1925 massacre. Today, the peculiar house he built for himself late in life is a major tourist attraction in Martinique.

With an exciting combination of scholarship and storytelling, award-winning anthropologist Richard Price takes us on a search for the real Medard. Using the Diamant massacre and the life of Aribot as emblems of Martinique's transition from a colonial society to a modern society, the author shows how the fishing village he encountered on his first trip to Martinique in 1962 has been transformed by a heavily assisted welfare-based consumer economy. And Medard, whose life was once a subversive symbol of anticolonial sentiment, has been silenced by contemporary myths . . . or has he?

Part historical mystery, part biography, part cultural studies, The Convict and the Colonel is a fascinating story of a society in transition and the role of the prophetic figure in historical memory.


"Price quotes a phrase from colleague Sidney Mintz about the kind of anthropology that is 'at the fault line between the large and the little.' In this intellectually daring book, he gets as close to the fault line as possible."

--Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Part ethnography, part oral history, and part autobiography, this book explores the reinterpretation of Martinique's history through the personal and collective memory of several generations of its inhabitants. Price (history and anthropology, Coll. of William and Mary) brilliantly weaves together archival material, interviews, and long-term ethnography to describe the political corruption that led to the 1925 election-day massacre of ten people, including one of the candidates. In the second and third chapters, Price draws on similar sources to tell the story of Medard Aribot, a "Robin Hood" folk artist who lives in a cave and is later banished to Devil's Island penal colony for "impertinence." We also read Price's own story, that of a young anthropologist who first began fieldwork in Martinique in 1962 and who witnessed the modernization of the island and its people. Throughout his engrossing narrative, Price reminds us that historical events are constantly reinvented and that the failing memories of subsequent generations may often turn history into legend and folklore. This book reads like a novel and is required for anyone interested in Caribbean studies. For large public libraries and anthropology and history collections.?Jim Woodman, Boston Athenaeum
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Price's history of Martinique from the 1920s to the present is definitive, and the tiny island's history during French colonial times is best described as, well, bizarre. We meet Medard, a large and powerful man in defiance of the bogus "elections" being held during the 1920s; as his ultimate act of rebellion, he carves a life-size model of the colonel who acts as governor of the island. There is a vivid description of the election-day riot when the statue is displayed, and the description of Medard's subsequent sentencing and incarceration on Devil's Island is nothing less than hair-raising. Price utilizes many primary sources in his research, in particular drawing on diary entries of one Philibert Larcher, still active in Martinique politics many years later. Meticulously researched by an author who actually lives there, this look at the cockeyed Martinique of the twenties is alternately fascinating and convoluted. (Price's juxtapositioning of Larcher's diary with "official" government accounts is interesting but difficult to read.) Joe Collins --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (November 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807046515
• ISBN-13: 978-0807046517
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,830,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Advance Praise from Readers, December 12, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: CONVICT & THE COLONEL (Hardcover)

"A superb calaloo of a book whose ingredients of autobiography, historical narrative and the anthropologist's pursuit of the origin of folk memories reconstruct the life of a Martinique fishing village. Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the post-colonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity."
--George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person, The Pleasures of Exile, Season of Adventure

"A wonderfully readable fusion of anthropology and memoir about culture, colonialism, and madness in the Caribbean. Price practices what a lot of postmodernists preach; the book's graceful writing and innovative form, tossing the reader back and forth in time and space, is supported by solid and original scholarship."
--Lucy R. Lippard, author of Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America

"By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price's research is more fascinationg than a piece of fiction."
--Maryse Condé, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Crossing the Mangrove, and The Last of the African Kings

"An engrossing and compelling book. . . . Richard Price continues to build a body of work that in seriousness and self-revelation goes beyond even the work of Clifford Geertz. But he is more than an anthropologist and stylist; he is a moralist, one who demands to be taken seriously. He enters the discussion of modern culture with Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques but he is able to carry it further than the master, because he has kept his intellectualizing anchored in the experience of cultural and social difference."
--Roger D. Abrahams, author of Singing the Master and Afro-American Folktales

"Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes."
--Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past