Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities: Antenor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition [ebk ed.] 9781003167037, 1003167039

Citation preview

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Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities

Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–​1911) was the reigning public intellectual and political critic in Haiti in the nineteenth century. He was the first “Black anthropologist” and “Black Egyptologist” to deconstruct the Western interpretation of global history and challenge the ideological construction of human nature and theories of knowledge in the Western social sciences and the humanities. As an anti-​racist intellectual and cosmopolitan thinker, Firmin’s writings challenge Western ideas of the colonial subject, race achievement, and modernity’s imagination of a linear narrative based on the false premises of social evolution and development, colonial history and epistemology, and the intellectual evolution of the Aryan-​White race. Firmin articulated an alternative way to study global historical trajectories, the political life, human societies and interactions, and the diplomatic relations and dynamics between the nations and the races. Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities is the first full-​length book devoted to Joseph Anténor Firmin. It reexamines the importance of his thought and legacy, and its relevance for the twenty-​first century’s culture of humanism, and the continuing challenge of race and racism. Celucien L.  Joseph is an intellectual historian, literary scholar, and theologian. He is an associate professor of English at Indian River State College. He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and a PhD in Theology and Ethics from the University of Pretoria (Pretoria, South Africa). He is the author of numerous academic books and peer-​reviewed articles. His recent books include Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion: Christianity, Vodou, and Secularism (2020), a 2020 “Important Political Book—​PoliticoTech Awards Finalist,” and Theologizing in Black: On Africana Theological Ethics and Anthropology (2020). His books From Toussaint to Price-​Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought (2013), and Haitian Modernity and Liberative Interruptions: Discourse on Race, Religion, and Freedom (2013) received Honorable Mention at The Pan African International 2014 Book Awards. Paul C. Mocombe (PhD) is a Haitian philosopher and sociologist. He is a former visiting professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Bethune Cookman University, an assistant professor of Philosophy and Sociology at West Virginia State University, and the president/​CEO of The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc. He is the author of many influential books, such as The Theory of Phenomenological Structuralism; Haitian Epistemology; and Identity and Ideology in Haiti.

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Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

130 Musical Stimulacra Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen Ivan Delazari 131 Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-​Reflection William Franke 132 Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures Silvia Schultermandl and Klaus Rieser 133 Pluralism, Poetry, and Literacy A Test of Reading and Interpretive Techniques Xavier Kalck 134 Visual Representations of the Arctic Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics Edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Arja Rosenholm, and Vlad Strukov 135 Homemaking for the Apocalypse Domesticating Horror in Atomic Age Literature & Media Jill E. Anderson 136 Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities Anténor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Paul C. Mocombe 137 T. S. Eliot and the Mother Matthew Geary For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​ Routledge-​Interdisciplinary-​Perspectives-​on-​Literature/​book-​series/​RIPL

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Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities Anténor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Paul C. Mocombe

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First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Celucien L. Joseph and Paul C. Mocombe to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367460679 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367764678 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003167037 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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For Students of Haitian history and literature, whose devotion and efforts continue to inspire and empower us For Haitianist and Haitian writers, whose labor of love for Haiti and the Haitian people foster black joy and enlighten our path to walk in the light of knowledge and understanding For Haitian Youths and the new generations of Haitians in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora that have yet to be born

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Contents

Introduction: Firmin, Global History, and the End of Race 

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C E L U C I E N L . JO SE P H

PART 1

Firmin, Haitian History, and Caribbean Intellectual Heritage  9 1 Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse 

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G L O D E L M E ZIL AS TR A N S L ATE D B Y N ATH A N H . DIZE AN D SIO BHAN MEÏ

2 “Tous les hommes sont l’homme”: Anténor Firmin, Toussaint Louverture, Racial Equality, and the Fact of Blackness 

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PA U L B .   M I L L E R

3 Reinventing Europe: Joseph Anténor Firmin and the Legacy of the Nineteenth Century 

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G U D R U N   R ATH

4 The Sense of Place in Firmin’s Monsieur Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et de la République d’Haïti 

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G E O R G E S E DDY L UCIE N TR A N S L ATE D B Y N ATH A N H . DIZE AN D SIO BHAN MEÏ

5 Forms of Firminism: Understanding Joseph Anténor Firmin  C E L U C I E N L . JO SE P H

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viii Contents PART 2

Firmin, Black Internationalism, and Pan-​Africanism 

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6 Anténor Firmin, Pan-​Africanism, and the Struggle for Race Vindication 

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G E R S H O M WIL L IA MS

7 Lions and Sheep: Anténor Firmin, Pan-​Africanism, and the Rebirth of Malcolm X 

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TA M M I E J E N KIN S

8 At the Center of World History, before Diop, There Was Firmin: Great Scholars on the Black African Origin of the Ancient Egyptians and Their Civilization  147 PATR I C K D E L ICE S

PART 3

Firmin, Universalism, and Western Intellectual History 

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9 Firmin and the Laws of Multilineal Evolution 

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M ATTH E W C ARSO N  AL L E N

10 Reconstructing the Universality of the Social Sciences and Humanities: Anténor Firmin and Black (Haitian) Atlantic Thought and Culture 

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PA U L C .   M O C O MB E

11 The Abolition of All Privilege: Race, Equality, and Freedom in the Work of Anténor Firmin 

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G R E G B E C K E TT

List of Contributors  Index 

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Introduction Firmin, Global History, and the End of Race Celucien L. Joseph

Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–​1911) was the reigning public intellectual and political critic in Haiti in the nineteenth century. Firmin was the first “Black anthropologist” and “Black Egyptologist” to deconstruct the Western interpretation of global history and challenge the ideological construction of human nature and theories of knowledge in the Western social sciences and the humanities—​through his interdisciplinary tour de force De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive) (1885), translated in the English language as The Equality of the Human Races: Positivist Anthropology (2002) by Asselin Charles. In this seminal monograph, Firmin interrogated the conventional boundaries of research methods in the social sciences and humanities in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, respectively—​although the social sciences came to be recognized as distinct disciplines of thought until the nineteenth century. His research was influenced by the philosophy of positivism, grounded in the ideas of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–​1857) to critique the traditional approaches to and the contemporary theories of human origin, civilization, history, culture, and research representation. Correspondingly, he was influenced by the European (particularly the British) Democratic and Socialist traditions. Yet the Haitian soil also provided the cultural and intellectual antecedents for Firmin’s moral and intellectual development. For example, Haitian political liberalism had substantially shaped Firmin’s political vision and democratic worldview. Firmin’s intellectual motif was animated by a spirit of rational inquiry, democratic idealism, and the appeal to universal reason. He articulated an alternative way to study global historical trajectories, the political life, human societies and interactions, and diplomatic relations and dynamics between nations and the races. The sociological dimension of Firmin’s thought not only reassesses the history of the social thought of his period, but stresses the complex factors and forces that contributed to the (economic) development of human societies and cultures, and the concept of advanced and less advanced civilizations in the modern world. For example, Firmin’s revisionist history makes a clarion call to acknowledge the “Black Genesis” of human origin and the manifold contribution of

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2 Introduction precolonial Africa to universal civilization and human flourishing, in both ancient history and modern history. The Firminian turn in the social sciences and the humanities, and in anthropology in particular, was a discursive discourse that questioned the ideological premises of theories of knowledge and the myth of a “superior race,” and the logic of Western interpretation of global history and the historical narrative about ancient African history and culture. These ideas and philosophies are found in Firmin’s most important works: De L’Égalité des Races Humaines. Anthropologie Positive; M. Roosevelt, Président des Etats Unis et la République d’Haïti; and Les Lettres de Saint Thomas. Études sociologiques, historiques et littéraires. Evidently, this book, Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities, is an attempt to meditate intellectually on the intellectual life, writings, and the legacy of Joseph Anténor Firmin. In his body of work, Firmin projects a twofold objective presented as a concurrent intellectual event: (1) deconstructing the conventional contours of the social sciences and the humanities and the theories of knowledge about the races and peoples in the modern world for the advancement of the human race, and (2) reconstructing race and articulating a more accurate narrative of societal development and human evolution, from a postcolonial imagination resulting in a new positive narrative of human societies, global history, and human understanding—​toward the common good. Because Firmin was a statesman and civil servant, the book also offers an assessment of Firmin’s politics and democratic ideas, and his propositions about nation-​building and national renewal, and the significance of safeguarding Haiti’s sovereignty, independence, and autonomy in the nineteenth-​century world of aggressive empires. This project not only presents Firmin as a deconstructionist of the social sciences and humanities and theories of knowledge articulated in the Western history of ideas and social thought of his era; it also accentuates his manifold contributions to various academic studies and fields of knowledge: history, anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, Egyptology, political science, critical race theory, literature, and so on. As an anti-​racist intellectual and cosmopolitan thinker, Firmin challenges the Western idea of the colonial subject, race achievement, and modernity’s notion of a linear narrative of progress and reason based on the false premises of social evolution and development, colonial history and epistemology, and the intellectual evolution of the Aryan-​White race. Firmin was an anti-​imperial intellectual who wrote not only against American imperialism in the American continent, but also against Western imperial hegemony in the developing world and among the darker peoples of the world. He was also critical of the Haitian society, what he phrased specifically, La mentalité haitienne (the Haitian mentality) and the political history associated with the rise of dictatorship and political totalitarianism in the Caribbean nation. In his political career as a statesman, diplomat, and ultimately a candidate to the Haitian presidency, Firmin

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Introduction  3 energetically labored to democratize Haitian politics and the country’s civil and political societies, and the systems and institutions that kept it running.

An Overview of the Chapters Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities is a special volume on Joseph Anténor Firmin that reexamines the importance of his thought and legacy, and the relevance of his ideas for the contemporary social sciences and the humanities in academia, the twenty-​first century’s culture of humanism, and the continuing challenge of race and racism. This volume seeks to fill in the intellectual gaps of Firmin’s work in the Anglophone world. Modern scholarship on the writings of Firmin is scarce in the Anglophone world, and as the “first Black anthropologist” in the Western world, contemporary anthropology, both in the United States and elsewhere in the Anglophone community, has not given serious attention to the importance and complexity of his ideas in the discipline and its cognates. Firmin’s contribution to the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, political theory, history, and comparative study has been overlooked by both American and European thinkers. The reexamination of Firmin’s thought is significant for contemporary research in the social sciences and the humanities, ancient history, Black and Pan-​ African Studies, ancient African history, and particularly, the renewed scholarly interest in Haiti and Haitian Studies in North America. This volume explores various dimensions in Joseph Anténor Firmin’s thought and his role as theorist, anthropologist, cultural critic, public intellectual, statesman, diplomat, political scientist, Pan-​Africanist, and humanist. The contributors to this volume originate from four geographical locations: Haiti, Canada, Western Europe, and the United States, bringing an international and transcultural perspective on Firmin. They have written well-​ balanced and well-​ researched chapters. The book explores Firmin’s geopolitical, religious, intellectual, philosophical, and racial ideas and writings from different angles and interdisciplinary academic disciplines. The book has 12 chapters and is divided into three equal parts. Part 1, “Firmin, Haitian History, and Caribbean Intellectual Heritage,” contains five chapters that attempt to locate Firmin’s ideas and writings in the context of Haiti’s national history and the Caribbean intellectual tradition. The opening chapter is by Glodel Mezilas; he situates Firmin’s intellectual ideas and writings within the concept of race and modernity in the Caribbean discourse. By drawing a critical picture of the idea of race and modernity in the Caribbean region and taking into consideration the English-​speaking, Spanish-​speaking, and French-​speaking contexts, Mezilas highlights the Haitian context of the nineteenth century with the special publications of Anténor Firmin, Pan-​Africanism, the Cuban and Dominican contexts, Antillanity, Creolization, Negritude, Haitian

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4 Introduction Indigenism, and the relationship between race and political theory in the English-​speaking context through the thought of Charles V.  Mills. Finally, the chapter allows us to understand not only the history of race and political theory in the region but also stresses the different mutations of the Caribbean discourse regarding race and modernity. In the second chapter, Paul B.  Miller attempts an overview of some aspects of Firmin’s arguments and rhetorical strategies in De l’égalité des races humaines in keeping with the thematic focus of this volume. Miller situates this overview as well as the historical reception of Firmin within a comparative framework with his national forebear Toussaint Louverture—​a comparison that is invited and justified by the strategic predominance of references to Louverture in Firmin’s book. This transhistorical constellation suggests that Louverture, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and Firmin, at its close, both ran up against the fact of whiteness, which, though with different contexts, objectives, and results, conspired against the dream of égalité for both compatriots. The third chapter situates Firmin’s intellectual ideas in relation to the legacy of the nineteenth century. Gudrun Rath argues that Firmin calls forth the deconstruction of Europe so it can be reinvented. In essays such as Arthur de Gobineau’s De l’inegalité des races humaines (1853), rhetorics of comparison have been a central element in the construction of different races and the modeling of “scientific racism.” Nevertheless, these racist ideologies did not remain uncontested, and it was especially the intellectual legacy of the Haitian revolution that played a key role in the shaping of what has recently been named “Haitian Atlantic humanism” (Marlene Daut). She underscores Firmin’s role in the shaping of a “Haitian Atlantic humanism.” The next chapter of Part  1 was originally submitted to us in the French language by Haitian historian and geographer Georges Eddy Lucien. It was translated by Nathan H.  Dize and Siobhan Meï. In this chapter, Lucien examines the sense of place in Firmin’s important book Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States, and the Republic of Haiti (Monsieur Roosevelt, Président des États-​ Unis et de la République d’Haïti), which Firmin published in 1905. Lucien remarks that Firmin’s work is the subject of numerous studies and is taken up through various points of entry. But, until now, the link between his work and geography has rarely been addressed, even though his use of a geographical lexicon, to weaken Gobineau’s thesis or to revisit the history of the United States from its beginnings, has consistently been a feature of his writing. To a certain degree the geographical spirit that inhabits his work has been rendered abstract by the existing literature. This applies not only to the geographical concepts mobilized in Firmin’s work, but also the position of and curiosity about geographers that animate his writing. Finally, in Chapter 5, Joseph provides an overview on the life, work, and civic roles of Joseph Anténor Firmin. It locates the development of Firmin’s ideas and Firminism as a doctrine within the historical, political,

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Introduction  5 and intellectual context of Haitian history and the Haitian society. In particular, it situates Firmin’s political vision and democratic ideals within Haiti’s Liberal Party and democratic socialism—​toward social transformation, national reform, and political stability. The chapter also discusses Firmin’s civic roles as a statesman and Minister of Finances, Economics, and Foreign Affairs that were part of his great service of the Haitian people. Overall, the chapter suggests viewing Joseph Anténor Firmin as a social democrat and an activist-​intellectual who defended the best interests of the Haitian people and who made a relentless attempt to foster national unity, social coherence, and political stability. Part 2, “Firmin, Black Internationalism, and Pan-​Africanism,” includes three chapters. First, the overall perspective of the division of this chapter highlights Firmin’s contributions to Black internationalism and Pan-​ Africanism. Second, it compares Firmin’s ideas on these topics with other important Black intellectuals such as Malcolm X, Cheikh Anta Diop, and others. In his essay, Gershom Williams analyzes two key concepts in Firmin’s work, Pan-​Africanism and race vindication. Williams notes that, although several writers have repeatedly made worthwhile mention of Firmin’s profound influence on Pan-​African studies and his intimate nexus to the first Pan-​African, London conference in 1900, very few contemporary writers to date have extensively explored his early dialogue and discourse with fellow countrymen Benito Sylvain and Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams. These three Caribbean intellectuals would begin several years of alliance and planning that would eventually culminate in the historic conference of 118 years ago. The inaugural Pan-​ African Conference in 1900 constituted an international Black response to the global systems of racism and imperialism. H.S. Williams first popularized the term “Pan-​Africanism” in 1897 when he founded a Pan-​ African Association in England. Within the compositional framework of this paper, William articulates a twofold purpose and the intent to critically excavate and explore the formidable role of Firmin’s early intersectional correspondence with two other Caribbean nationalists who then collectively organized to spawn this timely, anti-​colonial, anti-​imperialist, freedom movement. The early Pan-​Africanist ideology and its evolutionary movement functioned as an essential counternarrative to the hegemonic, cultural imposition of Euro-​ America and served fundamentally as a source of universal race pride, race unity, and race vindication for all people of African heritage and descent. Tammen Jenkins investigates Pan-​African ideology by bringing Firmin and Malcolm X into the conversation. She observes that for years persons of African descent have engaged in intellectual, cultural, or political movements designed to create unity among this group. They began using their texts as vehicles for adding their voices on larger social issues such as colonialism, racial inequality, and human rights. Although prominent figures such as Anténor Firmin, Henry Sylvester Williams, and

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6 Introduction Benito Sylvain emerged as leaders of the Pan-​Africanist movement, it was grassroots participants like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and later, Malcolm X who integrated ideas of self-​determinism into the forefront of African American political struggles in the United States. Unlike his aforementioned counterparts, Firmin’s Pan-​ Africanist views systematically deconstructed racialized mythologies regarding Black inferiority while propagating the notion that there is equality among the races. Firmin proposed Pan-​Africanism as a way to resist European colonization in Africa and to encourage individuals of African descent to unify. Finally, Patrick Delices contributes the final chapter of Part 2 through a critical appraisal of the ideas of Joseph Anténor Firmin and the great Senegalese physicist and intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop about the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization. Delices traces the intellectual ideas of Diop in the footsteps of Firmin; he also observes that in the scholarly world of Afrocentrism, it is the name, as well as the scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop not Joseph Anténor Firmin that evokes racial pride and historical vindication in debunking Eurocentrism and white supremacist intellectual dogma by substantiating the claim that the ancient Egyptians along with their great civilization were Blacks, Africans, not whites, Europeans. The final division of the book is entitled “Firmin, Universalism, and Western Intellectual History” (Part  3). It also includes three chapters. Mathew Allen’s opening chapter of Part  3 examines Firmin’s engagement with the law of multilineal evolution. He observes that Firmin’s 1885 magnum opus, De l’égalité des races humaines, with its subtitle, anthropologie positive, leaves little doubt as to the emancipatory potential of Comtean positivism. Its emphasis on the universal and uniform action of a finite set of laws allowed Firmin to unseat the prejudice underlying scientific racism. However, this is not the whole story. As a philosophy of history, positivism was hostile to difference. In its unilineal model of evolution, the apotheosis of history comes about through the universal imposition of European modernity. Firmin is highly attuned to these tensions. In De l’égalité, we see him advance a critical reading of Comte that embraces the French thinker’s emphasis on law while dispensing with his Eurocentrism. Drawing on readings from an array of thinkers in various fields, such as Broca, Hegel, and W.D. Whitney, Firmin articulates a theory of parallel historical evolution originating independently in multiple centers. It continued to inform his thinking about the history and geopolitical situation of Haiti over the course of his career. In this chapter, Allen examines Firmin’s readings of contemporary debates and recovers the originality of his theory of multilineal evolution. This theory consisted in isolating historical law from its realization in any specific cultural form. It allowed Firmin to conceptualize the coexistence of multiple developmental trajectories, and to rescue Haitian modernity from the charge of the mimicry of Europe.

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Introduction  7 In the next chapter, Paul Mocombe argues that Anténor Firmin’s critique of Western anthropology is not a vindication for Afrocentrism as expressed in the works of Afrocentric scholars like Molefi Kete Asante. Instead, it is a call to highlight the contribution of African people to intellectual thought and development as it has come to be embodied in the universal ontology and epistemology of science. Be that as it may, reconstructing the social sciences and the humanities from the racist constructs of nineteenth-​century racial ideology as Firmin is suggesting in his work is not a call for a reification of race and racial ideologies as demonstrated in the Afrocentric paradigm. Firmin’s intent is to highlight the contributions of African people to science based on African intellectual thought prior to slavery and colonization. Hence, the chapter concludes by continuing the work of Firmin through reconstructing a social science and humanistic paradigm, which continues the universal project of science by building on and taking into account the African contribution to that universalism as demonstrated in Paul C. Mocombe’s phenomenological structuralism. In the final chapter of the book, Greg Beckett has brilliantly argued that Joseph Anténor Firmin called for the abolition of all privilege based on the race concept and the doctrine of white supremacy. He advances the idea that Firmin calls for full equality and freedom of all people, regardless of their race. He remarks that anthropology has done much to challenge the idea of the natural inferiority of races, but at times this challenge has ignored the problem of racism. Drawing on Firmin’s argument that the end of racism would facilitate the abolition of all privilege, Beckett suggests ways in which the discipline of anthropology might build on his critique to develop a more powerful response to the reemergence of ideas of innate difference and inequality. Ultimately, Firmin believed that ideologies, human practices, and ideas that sustain white supremacy and defer human progress in the world should be rejected. Correspondingly, he upheld the notion of the inherent equality of the human races and the fundamental equality of nations premised on the first proposition. Firmin was a champion of humanism and universalism and he essentially believed that tout moun se moun/​ every person is a human being, and the basic moral responsibility to love one another was a nonnegotiable Firminian thesis. We hope both resources will be useful for future research and scholarship on Joseph Anténor Firmin. In particular, we hope the academic community in the Anglophone world will find this book, the first published monograph on Firmin in the English language, both accessible and worthy of reading.

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Part 1

Firmin, Haitian History, and Caribbean Intellectual Heritage

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1  Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse Glodel Mezilas Translated by Nathan H. Dize and Siobhan Meï The chapter draws a critical picture of the idea of race and modernity in the Caribbean discourse, taking into consideration some inflections related to the English-​speaking, Spanish-​speaking, and French-​speaking contexts. It highlights the Haitian milieu of the nineteenth century, Pan-​ Africanism, the Cuban and Dominican contexts, Antillanité, Créolisation, Négritude, Indigénisme, and the relationship between race and political theory in the English-​speaking countries vis-​à-​vis Charles V. Mills. This chapter aims to trace a critical panorama to offer a critical overview of the idea of race in Caribbean discourse, emphasizing its impact and variations as it pertains to the construction of cultural identity, the battles fought against colonial modernity, forms of anti-​racist resistance, and the development of philosophical thought, all while keeping in mind the different historical, ideological, and geographic characteristics of the region. As the first site of the expansion and deployment of Western imperialism and colonialism, the Caribbean has been marked by violence, the slave trade, dehumanization, racialization, marginalization, and exploitation of European colonial modernity.1 As such, its historicity carries the traces of an ontological and anthropological fissure due to its racial specificity in relation to a European humanity prefigured as superior. If, following Martin Heidegger, Greek philosophy defines man by his capacity for logos (or reason) and Christianity defines man as a creature of God, the Caribbean man emerges in history and in the world as a wounded and humiliated being, inferior to European humanity.2 Consequently, racial difference is at the center of the historical marginalization of this region while anthropologically signaling the Caribbean Dasein. More precisely, the 1685 Code Noir defines an enslaved person as property, making the enslaved person subject to the will of their owner. The enslaved person is ontologically, juridically, and sociologically null.3 In other words, the idea of race constitutes the essential structure and referential center of European, colonial discourses of domination, legitimation, expansion, and exploitation in the context of the Caribbean. Racial discourse served as one of the tools of domination weaponized by

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12  Glodel Mezilas the colonial order. In this way, the Caribbean subject is born from violence, suffering, and a lack of humanity that modern philosophy and the social sciences (notably nineteenth-​century anthropology) helped legitimize and consolidate on ideological and political grounds. In addition, modern Western domination was simultaneously epistemic and political, in the way that it traverses modes of thought and forms of political domination. Likewise, this particular modernity was colonial and characterized itself according to a certain ambivalence: freedom and colonial wounds. On the one hand, this modernity liberated the European subject from the strictures of religion, authority, and tradition, while on the other hand, it participated in processes of colonization, enslavement, racialization, and domination beyond the borders of Europe. This means that the Age of Enlightenment did not cast its shadow over the darkness of the Caribbean due to the type of “race” that inhabited this region. Racial difference was the dividing line between European and non-​European humanity. In Robert Legros’s analysis of the concept of humanity he is completely silent (or forgetful) about the incomplete and biased character of humanity in the context of colonial, European modernity in which race determines everything.4 Edward Said shows the complicity of culture and domination in European thought.5 Hannah Arendt puts nineteenth-​ century imperialism and racism into conversation.6 Aimé Césaire reveals the resemblance between colonialism and Nazism as it relates to racism.7 Frantz Fanon describes, in detail, the colonial and racial experience of the Black Antillean; at the end of the nineteenth century, the Haitian poet Massillon Coicou recalls the pain of the enslaved as a result of their Blackness.8 Before these authors, Immanuel Kant explored the inferiority of Black people, expelling them from the ranks of humanity in Anthropology; Hegel underscored that Africa is outside of history and thus deprived of the idea of God; Arthur de Gobineau theorized the inferiority of races; Ernest Renan and other racist ideologues defended the superiority of the European race. The era of imperialism coincides with the development of racism and the so-​called civilizing mission of Europe within newly colonized territories. These new forms of colonization were enacted on the foundation of racism and the contingent notion of European racial superiority, even though these forms of colonization were preceded by the abolition of slavery for purely economic and structural reasons related to the Industrial Revolution. All of this demonstrates how Western modernity and racist ideology coincide; colonialism justified itself based on the idea of European racial superiority. As such, colonial conquests were thought of as the expression of European racial superiority over non-​Europeans. However, the idea of race did not conceptualize itself in modern political theory, which had developed notions of the social contract, sovereignty, the rights of man, liberty, equality, representation, and so on. All the same, debates on modernity and postmodernity in Western thought do not address the racial paradigm, the very ideological basis upon which Europe legitimized its

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  13 grand narratives in the face of other cultures and societies on the basis of racial superiority.9 Thus, starting in the nineteenth century and first in Haiti, Caribbean discourse echoes the race problem. Even if scientifically speaking race is a discourse without weight, without grounding, and without justification, it is socially operative. Race is a social construct that has concrete political effects. Caribbean discourse as a collection of essays, analyses, reflections, and critical perspectives tackles the question of race head-​on in order to produce criticism grounded in the uniqueness and specificities of the region. This means that the issue of race and modernity within Caribbean discourse is neither homogeneous nor uniform; it is marked by fractures, divisions, and diverse perspectives. These fractures and divisions give way to a diversity of ideas in the reception of the racial question. Perhaps the best way to approach the racial question is to use the methodologies of the history of ideas as they developed in Latin America beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. The history of ideas in Latin America is the history of the dissemination, adaptation, and transformation of European ideas as they relate to political and ideological imperatives in Latin America. It is also the history of autonomy, or the pursuit of an oppositional autonomy in the region with regard to Europe. This history brings to light the different interactions between Europe and the Latin American region. According to Leopoldo Zea, the history of ideas does not refer to the ideas of Latin Americans in and of themselves, but rather how these ideas were adapted and adopted in conjunction with European thought. This also includes strategies designed for liberation from European cultural domination, such as positivism.10 This history of ideas should take epistemological mutations within the region into account. Likewise, approaching the question of race according to the history of ideas from a Caribbean perspective allows us to see how this question was received in the region, its mutation, its evolution, and the adaptations that it underwent. The handling of the racial question and critiques of modernity are not singular in the region. This is why it is worth considering their various trajectories in the Francophone, Hispaniphone, and Anglophone Caribbean, along with their continuities and discontinuities. Taking these trajectories into account will also show how this discourse will influence constructions of national identity and philosophical discourse. For this reason, this chapter must, by necessity, provide a synthesis of the general history of Caribbean discourse as it relates to the racial question and critiques of modernity.

Anthropology and the Haitian Context in the Nineteenth Century The Haitian historical context of the nineteenth century was marked by a radical feat that went unrecognized within the Western tradition

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14  Glodel Mezilas and its historiography. This feat was the 1804 Revolution, which put an end to colonialism, enslavement, and European racial domination over Black Africans. The revolution took place during a moment historically characterized by relationships of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization. This revolution implicitly carried with it a discourse on what Legros calls the idea of humanity, on race, social relations, culture, religion, and so forth. It presented a radical rupture from the colonial order instituted since 1492 with the conquest and colonization of the Americas, justified, in part, by race or, at the very least, by the idea of European racial superiority. This means that this revolution was a sort of counterdiscourse to modernity, race, and Western domination. This counterdiscourse is founded upon three premises that should be interrogated: the post-​racial premise, the premise of humanity, and the premise of deconstructing racism. The first aspect of this counterdiscourse on race and modernity presupposes that race is not a biological or natural fact, but more a social construction that serves political, ideological, cultural, and economic ends. One of the manifestations of this movement to deconstruct race is Article 14 of Haiti’s 1805 constitution, which stipulates that all Haitians are henceforth recognized under the generic denomination of “Black people.” This Article explains that Haitians are Black, even though in the country after the revolution there were mixed-​race peoples, whites, and a whole range of skin tones despite their limited numbers. This Article envisions the surpassing of the category of race, the rejection of phenotypical distinction, and the assigning of skin color. Here, Black does not refer to a racial or ethnic category, but a human condition. Black, in this case, dissolves essentialization and racial fixity. In this way, Black implies a valorization of a category that had been historically rendered as inferior and an elevation of this category to the ranks of humanity; a humanity that does not discriminate and that does not build borders between groups of people. Furthermore, the concepts of what it means to be Haitian and what it means to be Black do not harken back to distinctions of race, ethnic groups, or social categorization, but to the same communal identity and to a vision of togetherness beyond ideological divides. After independence, the founding fathers of Haiti rejected the name “Saint-​Domingue” in favor of Ayiti, the former, pre-​Columbian name of the island. This return to the former name of the island is a decolonial gesture, a mental deconstruction of the racist schemes of modernity. So, the terms “Ayiti” and “Blacks” are free from any colonial and racist determinism and they presuppose a critique of racism as a “moral evil” and of modernity as a discourse that legitimizes racism. In this same vein, we can identify the second mode of thought: the question of humanity. This logic is of vital importance for understanding the impacts of the Haitian Revolution, its counterdiscourse to modernity, and its critique of race. The logic of humanity emerges from the fact that,

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  15 after the Haitian Revolution of 1804, Haitian governments undertook the task of sharing the ideals of this revolution—​including anticolonialism, anti-​ slavery, and anti-​ racism—​ beyond the national borders of Haiti, without regard to race, color, geographic location, or culture. The post-​ revolutionary Haitian governments offered assistance to Latin American revolutionaries fighting against the Spanish-​American empire. Simon Bolívar was in Haiti when he was chosen to be the leader of the Spanish-​American revolutions. He made many visits to Haiti and received financial as well as moral support under the sole condition, suggested to him by President Alexandre Pétion, that slavery be abolished in these liberated lands.11 In other words, the abolition of slavery was the single ethical condition that came with Haitian offers of aid. We know of course that slavery involved the debasement and degradation of people by people. Slavery’s matrix was forged through the concepts of race, superiority, and inhumanity. In demanding its abolition, Haitian governments presupposed the end of racism and thus the rejection of the idea of race and all distinctions made on so-​called biological and natural facts. This support was given in the same way to the Greek revolutionaries who were fighting against the Ottoman Empire in 1820. This is the same spirit in which Haiti welcomed thousands of African Americans expelled from the United States for the simple fact of their Blackness. The Charleston Church was one of the first American institutions to organize a mass emigration of African Americans to Haiti, a country that saw itself as the land of redemption for Black people and Africans in the New World. This rehabilitation took place on an ethical, political, and historical plane. The third part of the counter-​modernity discourse was the scientific critique of racism advanced by Haitian anthropologists at the end of the nineteenth century who countered Antoine Gobineau’s theses. One of the tasks of these Haitian theoreticians was to deconstruct theses that were invested in the inferiority of races, specifically Black people. Taking inspiration from the revolution, anthropological studies, and historical events, they illustrated just how false and stupid these racist theses were. In his classic 1885 work, De l’égalité des races humaines, Anténor Firmin dismantles Gobineau’s racist theses. In 1884, Louis Joseph Janvier, a contemporary of Firmin’s, had already published L’égalité des races humaines and in 1882, with Ramon Betances (a Puerto Rican living in Paris), he published Les détracteurs de la race noire et de la République d’Haïti. Through these routes, Haitian intellectuals effectively established themselves as defenders of Haiti. As Laennec Hurbon writes: This reclamation is not the work of the Black masses of former slaves, but rather of their representatives: heroes (that is to say, those who demonstrated the capacity of Black people to access the Enlightenment—​ the founding site of the master’s (white) power. Haiti’s intellectual production will save Haiti, by rehabilitating

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16  Glodel Mezilas the notion of Blackness and history itself, all the way to its very foundations.12 At the end of the nineteenth century, Haitian anthropology saw itself as critical and endeavored to challenge racist theses in great force.

Pan-​Africanism and the Idea of Race Caribbean discourse at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was especially marked by the ideology of Pan-​Africanism as a form of resistance, by ethnocultural nationalism, by the self-​affirmation and self-​defense of Black people in the face of racism, and by the discriminatory nature of Western modernity. If during the colonial period, the enslaved formed a counterculture by recovering their traditions, their cosmogonies, and their beliefs, Pan-​ African ideology became the basic frame of reference for identity and race to combat the project of modern racism. Through Pan-​ Africanism, the Black elite developed a form of self-​ affirmation using Africa as the central frame of reference. John B. Russwurm of Jamaica and Edward John Blyden of the Danish Virgin Islands were the first defenders of this ideology.13 In 1828, Russwurm migrated to Liberia, after having fallen victim to racism in the United States, and he became the greatest promoter of the return to Africa. A few years later, Blyden himself would also migrate to Liberia and continue his study of theology. He would become one of the first to theorize race and the foundations of Pan-​Africanism. As such, he managed to develop a few ideas central to the demands of the Black race, like the return to Africa. He developed the notion of the “African Personality” and he supported the idea that Black people could not happily live among people of other races. Other intellectuals from the region such as Anténor Firmin, Benito Sylvain, and Henry Silvester Williams (from Trinidad) would go on to develop the ideology of Pan-​Africanism. In 1890, Benito Sylvain launched a monthly journal in Paris titled La fraternité. A central organ for the interests of Haiti and the Black race, Sylvain collected publications by Victor Schoelcher from 1891 to 1893. In the same year, Sylvain was admitted into the Société d’Ethnographie de Paris where he was able to create a subcommittee called the Comité Oriental et Africain. In 1895, he wrote a letter to Firmin asking for his help in organizing a conference that would take place at the same time as the Universal Exposition and would include all the Western scholars and spokespersons from the denigrated race. Henry Sylvester, Sylvain, and Firmin planned to hold the conference in Paris, but it took place in London from July 23 to 25 in 1900. The representatives of the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa articulated the statute of a new Pan-​African association under the auspices

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  17 of the Haitian president, Simon Sam; Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia; and the Liberian president, Joseph Coleman. Pan-​African ideas would follow this path and W.E.B. Du Bois would organize other conferences: one in Paris in 1921 and another in New York in 1928. It is after the Second World War that intellectuals and African politicians took up the lead of Pan-​Africanism, like the illustrious Kwame Nkrumah, who organized the fifth Pan-​African Conference in London in 1945. Marcus Garvey is one of the most prominent critical thinkers of the early twentieth century. His thinking centered around the issue of Black liberation and the liberation of Africans around the world. Garvey was fascinated by the Haitian Revolution and the heroes of the struggle for independence. As Gérard Pierre Charles wrote about Garvey: Garvey would begin by asserting himself; acknowledging that he lived within a system that relied on racism in order to perpetuate and justify its existence. Garvey suggested that within this system, Black people, the victims of racism par excellence, had no right to protest and could only question their role and place in history up to a certain point. This is why Garvey recognized the importance of Haiti as the first independent Black state in the Western hemisphere. The nation of Haiti was a symbol for Garvey, who remained impressed by the fact that the French were bankrupted by an oppressed Black population. As a result, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Toussaint [Louverture] […] just like the Black North-​Americans who fought for their cause.14 Garvey also denounced racism, the concept of the inequality of the races that allowed for the exploitation of colonized peoples. He said, “in the civilization of the twentieth century, there are no inferior races, there are people who are left behind, and by this we make them inferior […], all men are equal.”15 Gérard Pierre-​Charles has thus identified the major aspects of Garvey’s philosophy: 1) the unity of Black peoples in the West Indies with the colored population of the United States and Africa in a brotherhood for their material and spiritual well-​being; 2) the fight for the liberation of Africa with the aim of land restitution and the liberation of its force of labor; 3)  nationalism and the reclamation of African nationality. Africa, as the mother country, must ascend to self-​ determination and self-​expression in the framework of a “well-​ordered” global society. Garvey maintained that the Black man must return to his native land to better feel at home: If Europe is for the white man, if Asia is for brown [moreno] and yellow men, then surely Africa is for the Black man. The great white man has fought for the preservation of Europe, the great yellow and brown races are fighting for the preservation of Asia, and the four

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18  Glodel Mezilas hundred million Negroes shall shed, if need be, the last drop of their blood for the redemption of Africa and the emancipation of the race everywhere.16 It is also important for Black people to affirm themselves as such and to accept the way that they are, not to see themselves according to the Other, that is to say, the West.

Hispanicity, Cubanness, and Race Likewise, in the Dominican Republic, an awareness of a national consciousness initially involved the rejection or obfuscation of an African presence. In the nineteenth century, Cuban national consciousness as it manifested itself within white Creole society, was linked to a kind of negrophobia. Despite their differences, annexationist, separatist, and reformist ideologies were each deeply linked to slavery and to white Creole visions of race and Blackness as influenced by positivism, social Darwinism, and the biological sciences. Despite these differing ideologies, Cuban Creole society made the presence of Black peoples a national problem. The nation had an enemy on the inside: Blackness. Since then, an identity consciousness among white Cubans evolved from a conception of the nation in terms of the white race and a rejection of a Black presence. The reference to hispanicity, to Spanish traditions was hegemonic, as a way of creating a unified consciousness around a Spanish and white past. Because of this, the poet Nicolas Guillén evoked the forgetting of his sable grandfather, the identity theft of this poor, defenseless Black man to signify the obscure and hidden history of Black Cubans. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, José Martí was the only one to publicly defend the cultural diversity of his country and of Latin America. Martí developed an early, radical critique of modernity and the idea of race in his classic essay, “Nuestra America,” published in the Revue Ilustrada in New York in January of 1891, two years after the Panamerican Congress of 1889. In this text, Martí not only criticizes North American imperialism but also colonial modernity and the rejection of Black and Indigenous folk cultures. In particular, Martí took opposition to the theses of Domingo Sarmiento, the Argentine writer, who sought to follow the North American model, by importing Western modernity to the region. Opposed to Sarmiento, who spoke of the war between barbarism and civilization, Martí came to the defense of indigenous cultures. Martí emphasized: “there is no hatred of races because there is no such thing as race.” He defended the presence of Blackness as part of the Cuban identity: “With everyone, and for the good of everyone.”17 Martí had an integrationist vision of national identity by rejecting biological and evolutionary conceptions of race. His anti-​racism placed him in opposition to white Creole society.

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  19 Despite Martí’s position, racist ideology dominated Cuban society where slavery had endured until the end of the 1880s. In the beginning, criminologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz thought that the Cuban problem was linked to the African race, to Black people. Ortiz supported the idea that Africanness was an obstacle to Cuban national cohesion and that Black people should be made civilized so that they would no longer impede the country’s progress. The idea of Cubanness was constructed in the face of the barbaric nature of Black people: “the most backward aspect, the masses of Black people who aren’t sufficiently de-​ Africanized.”18 Furthermore, he states that “the Black race has, in various respects, come to profoundly impact the underbelly of Cuban life.”19 In his writings at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ortiz proposed resolving the problem of the Black presence in Cuba by way of education through a civilizing campaign. According to Ortiz, the practice of sorcery among Black peoples was due to a lack of a religious education in the colonial era. He contrasted black magic with white theology and to illustrate the superiority of Christianity over fetishism. Around the 1930s, Ortiz began to change his vision of Cubanness and decided to study the Black presence in Cuba because, according to him, “without the Negro, Cuba would not be Cuba.”20 In 1936, he founded the review Ultra and studied the condition of Black people in Cuba. One year later, he founded the Sociedad de Estudios Africanos (Society of African Studies) with its publication Estudios Africanos. This led to the reintegration of Afro-​ descended people in the national consciousness of Cuba. As such, the African element in Cuban culture developed progressively. In this sense, the idea that mestizo identity picked up ground in the Cuban consciousness, like it had in Latin America since the 1920s, under the influence of the branch of cultural anthropology that had replaced the term “race” with that of “culture” and which rejected ideas put forth by scientific racism, and so on. The concepts of transculturation, mestizaje, hybridity, and racial and cultural miscegenation would take on a positive meaning due to the paradigm shift that had occurred in cultural anthropology since the beginning of the twentieth century. These changes were reflected in the changes in Ortiz’s vision of Black Cubans and Cuban national identity.

Négritude and Indigénisme Indigénisme and négritude were, during the mid-​twentieth century, two complementary discourses that laid bare the limits of modernity and the idea of race. Chronologically, Indigenism preceded Negritude and concerned the defense and illustration of Haitian identity vis-​à-​vis African ethno-​cultural references. Indigénisme—​ indigeneity without native peoples—​was born in the context of a struggle against foreign domination (North American in 1915)  and sought to rediscover the hidden values of popular beliefs and traditions. Indigénisme entailed a search

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20  Glodel Mezilas for Haitian cultural authenticity through the critique of Western modernity, notably of French cultural influence. However, the discourse of indigenism, by defending African ethno-​cultural traditions, did not imply either a racial or a cultural absolutism. The indigenist critique was mostly cultural. It sought to reestablish the bases of the Haitian nation through a revalorization of its culture, its traditions, and its deeply held beliefs. As such, Haitian Creole, vodou, and popular mores became the sites of identification and reference for Haitian authors. This was when the works of Jean Price-​Mars on Haitian identity and culture first appeared.21 When it came to négritude, this movement occupied a central position within twentieth-​century Caribbean thought. Negritude had a broader reach than Haitian indigénisme, which was primarily focused on local and national contexts. Négritude embraced the Caribbean and Africa by forging connections between Caribbean and African intellectuals in Paris. Focused on Africa, négritude analyzed Caribbean culture by way of African referents. It was in Paris that the proponents of négritude would launch their movement, particularly through the journal L’Etudiant Noir. Proponents of the movement wanted to counter prejudices, stereotypes and, above all, anti-​Black discrimination, which was in vogue at the time. From now on, Black people are valued. Here, Blackness shifts from having a negative connotation to a positive one, forged by Césaire in his 1939 book, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (Return to My Native Land). Three authors were at the root of this new cultural, racial, and political dynamic: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Gontran Damas. They sought to express the grandeur and brilliance of African civilization as a source of dignity and pride for the Black man. They were influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, Pan-​Africanism, Marxism, and Haitian indigénisme. According to Césaire, négritude “is the recognition of the fact of Blackness, and the acceptance of this fact, for the destiny of Blackness, our history, and our culture.” Césaire’s definition places emphasis on the specificity and the unity of the Black experience as a historical development that emerged from Atlantic slavery and the plantation system in the Americas.

Antillanité and créolisation discourses in Glissant The paradigms of antillanité and créolisation articulate a radical critique of modernity and of race by calling into question all references to foundations, unique origins, and founding myths. The elaboration of these paradigms vis-​à-​vis the Caribbean experience allows one to grasp the complex, heterogeneous, open, indeterminate, and hybrid nature of Caribbean identity. Antillanité and créolisation evade all notions of closure, confinement, and racial or identitarian essence. The concept of antillanité was developed by the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, in the beginning of the 1960s, as a way of rethinking Caribbean reality after being subjected to a politics of “successful”

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  21 colonization. The terms créolisation and antillanité were used in reaction to the discourse of négritude, which was considered to be absolutist, universalist, and Afrocentric in its thinking. Négritude viewed Africa as a racial totality and cultural monolith that existed in opposition to the notion of cultural diversity. For Glissant, Négritude does not suffice to encapsulate the essence, the particularity of Antillean culture. Glissant denounces the notion of a Black essence or soul as imagined by the tenets of négritude. According to him, such an idea was necessary at a time when there was a historical negation of anything not considered Western, and in the Antilles, the contribution of local cultures needed to be reevaluated. Moreover, Glissant affirms that the Caribbean reality cannot be uniquely reduced to an African cultural past. It is much richer. Glissant explains the specificity of Antilleans through their diversity, their language, and their history. Antillanité is an open and plural identity. The concept breaks with the racial absolutism of négritude. For Glissant, this was a matter of creating an inventory of antillanité: a culture born of the plantation system, characterized by insularity, the importance given to skin color, creolization, not only of language but also of ways of life, the obscure memory of an African past, the primacy of orality, the act of completion and mixture. Antillanité is not enclosed by the isolation of an island, but it aims to resemble all the archipelagos of the Caribbean in a cultural mosaic.22 In the eyes of Glissant, the Caribbean is a relationship: What is the Caribbean in fact? A  series of multiple relationships. We all feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or we fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands. The Caribbean Sea is not an American lake. It is the estuary of the Americas. In this context, insularity takes on another meaning. Ordinarily, insularity is treated as a form of isolation, a neurotic reaction to place. However, in the Caribbean, each island embodies openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea. It is only those who are tied to the European continent who see insularity as confining. A Caribbean imagination liberates us from being smothered.23 The Martinican writer-​philosopher emphasizes that the problem with antillanité is that it is not yet incorporated into the Caribbean conscience. The first citation indicates as much, he writes: Antillanité lacks: moving from a common lived experience toward an expression of consciousness; moving from an intellectual postulation

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22  Glodel Mezilas made in the interest of academic elites toward an anchoring within a collective affirmation based on the actions of the people. Our reality as Antilleans is optative. It emerges from our natural lives, but it has only been a part of our history as an “ability to survive.”24 Glissant is aware that history weighs heavy on the concretization of antillanité: We know what threatens antillanité: the historical balkanization of the islands, the learning of different vernacular languages that are often opposed (the conflict between French and American English), the umbilical cords that maintain, with firmness and flexibility, in many of these islands the remnants of a particular metropole, the worrisome presence of powerful neighbors, Canada and especially the United States.25 Glissant insists that antillanité should also allow for the alliance and integration of peoples, despite the dependent situation of certain islands: “The hope for a Caribbean cultural identity should not be hampered by our people not achieving independence, so that the new Atlantis, our threatened but vital Caribbeanness, would disappear before taking root.”26 Contrary to négritude, according to Glissant, the history of the Caribbean begins with the slave ship: “The true genesis of the peoples of the Caribbean is the belly of the slave ship and the lair of the plantation.”27 Moreover, colonization is the key element needed to understand Caribbean history. It is from this moment that constitutes créolisation, which is the contact between many distinct cultures in one particular place in the world that gives rise to an entirely new culture that was completely unforeseen given the sum or the rudimentary synthesis of these individual elements. The term créolisation crystallizes Glissant’s theory of Relation, or “the same for all.” The concept of relation is key for thinking through Glissant’s philosophy. Placing the world in relation begins with the discovery of the Americas, first in the Caribbean in 1492. Before this period, there were worlds, separated one from the other. But with 1492, these worlds became the World. Glissant writes: “All peoples are young in the totalité-​monde. We are young and old on the horizon” (original italics).28 Since the discovery of the world, every world has opened up. This means that Columbus’s adventure has made us transition from a plurality of worlds to the uniqueness of the World. Parmenides said it already in his poem on nature: “The world is one, spherical and indivisible.”29 To which he adds: “Where, then, it has its farthest boundary, it is complete on every side, equally poised from the centre in every direction, like the mass of a rounded sphere; for it cannot be greater.”30 This world transformation, carried out by the West, involves the reduction of everything to its prescribed system of thought. This desire for hegemony serves as the basis for the modern tragedy (the discovery of

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  23 the Americas). Glissant writes: “What the West will export to the world, impose on the world, will not be its heresies, but its systems of thought, its thinking of systems.”31 And Jacques Coursil comments: Effectively, the most typical feature of Western culture is not its locally Western, but rather universal character. The regional cultures of Europe, Basque, Celtic, Occitan, etc. do not belong any more than any others to this West which we know is “not a place” but a project of colonization and capitalist exploitation of the land. The discoverers did not come to discover new cultures, but to appropriate, invest, and exploit places and peoples. All of the ingredients for the functioning of a global economy were brought together: banks, sea navigation […], mines, monocultures, markets, etc.32 For Glissant, the Caribbean is the site par excellence of créolisation, of the encounter between cultures following colonialism. Glissant believes that the most important and most imposing result of colonialism was the creation of “atavistic cultures,” meaning the reappearance of (African, Amerindian, Asian) ancestral cultural traits, present in the process of colonialism. These atavistic cultures blended together, creolized and, as a consequence, generated new forms of resisting the dominant culture. They are the product of cultures composed in the regions of the New World, born of colonization. The Antilles are the location of this créolisation. And the term créolisation can even apply to the current situation of the world, where a “terrestrial totality finally realized enables the interior of this totality (where there is no other organic authority, where everything is archipelagic) the most distant and most heterogeneous cultural elements out there can be put into relation. It produces unpredictable results.” Glissant’s form of créolisation does not refer to the “valorization of the African components of Creole culture and language, but according to, more or less, age-​old colonial acceptance meaning that everything that is born in the French colonies of the Caribbean and its resulting effects.” Glissant emphasizes that: “the world creolizes, meaning that the cultures of the world, when they are placed in contact with others, change one another and exchange with one another through irremissible conflicts, unforgiving wars, but also through advancements in conscience and in hope.” As such, identity-​relation is at the foundation of his theory of créolisation. The Discourse of Créolité At the end of the 1980s, a group of writers (Raphaël Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé) created a literary movement called créolité. Créolité sought to follow, or at least to deepen the aesthetic and identitarian explorations undertaken by négritude and antillanité. Créolité is in many ways an extension of Glissant’s theoretical work, however Confiant,

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24  Glodel Mezilas Chamoiseau, and Bernabé discuss créolité, whereas Glissant preferred the term créolisation, which accounts for the unfinished nature of processes of exchange, interaction, and transformation. The concept of créolité, however, refers to a state as opposed to a dynamic. Caribbean identity is articulated once and for all by following the various amalgamations that serve as the basis for its constitution. According to these writers, the Creole imaginary in the context of the Caribbean rests upon a chaotic arrangement born from “the confluence of several cultures, several languages, and several religions.”33 Their ideas are compiled in the collective [bilingual] volume Éloge de la créolité/​In Praise of Creoleness, coauthored by the three writers. The text begins: Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles. This will be for us an interior attitude-​better, a vigilance, or even better, a sort of mental envelope in the middle of which our world will be built in full consciousness of the outer world […] Our history is a braid of histories […] Our Creole culture was created in the plantation system through questioning dynamics made of acceptances and denials, resignations and assertions. A  real galaxy with the Creole language as its core, Creoleness has, still today, its privileged mode: orality […] In short, we shall create a literature, which will obey all the demands of modern writing while taking roots in the traditional configurations of our orality.34 They insisted that créolité is the “major aesthetic vector of our knowledge of ourselves and the world.”35 This proclamation is clear. It exposes the project of the writers. It is a question of showing that the Caribbean position is marked by métissage, cultural mixing. Caribbean culture is the result of African, European, Asian, and Amerindian contributions, which results in a new kind of being, the Creole. The Caribbean is the product of a cultural maelstrom of civilizations, languages, imaginaries, religions, and anthropologies that have not ceased—​ and will not cease—​to intertwine, to intermingle, and to clash in mad exuberance. Césaire’s “I am Black” is placed into question. Instead the phrase should read: “I am Creole.”36 These writers questioned the primacy of Africa in the constitution of the Caribbean identity. According to the authors of the créolité movement, the Caribbean identity is the product of several civilizations. Many different imaginaries contributed to the foundations of Caribbean cultures. Négritude privileged a single aspect of Caribbean identity by placing its emphasis on Blackness. In seeking universality, Négritude loses sight of the rich diversity of Caribbean cultures. Furthermore, according to the tenets of créolité, the true history of the Caribbean begins with the colonial plantation. It is here where Creole oraliture was born:

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  25 Creole oraliture was born in the plantation system, at the same time within and opposed to slavery, in an interrogative dynamic that accepts and refuses. It appears to be the aesthetic (surpassing even orality, simple ordinary words) of the shock of our still dispersed conscience and of a plantation-​based world in which we had to live (to resist/​exist for some, to dominate for others). This oraliture will confront the “values” of the colonial system (of the veil of civilization, of the legitimation of the extinction of the Caribbean, of the nègre/​slave, of the idea of one …), and subterraneously diffuse multiple counter-​values, a counterculture. The interaction between this counterculture and the dominant colonial culture would give rise to the lively zones of Creole culture, including our oraliture, in a mirror-​ movement, containing testimonies.37 The authors employ the resources of the Creole language to insert it into the literary space. The aesthetic they propose is an aesthetic where the Creole language works from within the French language. Confiant writes: Writing in French is a pleasure, writing in Creole is work because the creolophone author is required to hone their tools, which is not something that the Francophone writer who makes use of a tool sharpened by centuries of use must do.38 On a cultural level, they maintain that Caribbean culture is characterized by diversity, due to the elements brought by all the civilizations that came together in the region and which gave it a particular quality from an identitarian perspective. The Discourses of Hispanité and Indianité This discourse developed principally in the Dominican Republic within the context of the construction or narration of a national identity. In comparison with other countries within the Caribbean region, the Dominican Republic built its national identity based on the racist premises of Western modernity. The classic textual example of this is the work of Joaquin Balaguer. Balaguer’s thinking is part of a long intellectual and cultural tradition that conceptualizes Dominican nationality according to hispanic and indigenous references while obscuring ethno-​ African traditions and trivializing their contributions to the establishment of Dominican national identity. Another author whose work has influenced the discourse of national identity in the Dominican Republic is Manuel Arturo Peña Batle. Within his theory of Dominicanness, indigenous and hispanic elements form a homogeneous whole. In these ways, Domicanness is defined in reference to hispanicité and in the rejection of African contributions. This fictive identity mobilizes hispanic and indigenous references that date to the second half of the

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26  Glodel Mezilas nineteenth century, a time during which intellectuals such as Manuel Jesús Galvan sought to define the symbolic languages of Dominican Republican national culture. Galvan shows that the Dominican Republican race is the product of an indigenous and hispanic mélange while forgetting the presence of African roots.39 Given that the dominant fictive ethnicity elided African references, the négritude movement had little resonance within the Dominican Republic. In the same way, the representation of Haiti in the Dominican collective imaginary is associated with the idea of race and Africa. Also, the Dominican Republic assimilated to barbarity and to a civilization where the white race is predominant. Under the Trujillo dictatorship, censuses of the population were manipulated with the “intention of augmenting the number of white inhabitants and of artificially reducing the numbers of Blacks and dark-​skinned mulattos.”40

Race, Modernity, and Political Theory This section of our chapter addresses a particular aspect of the question of race and of modernity in Caribbean discourse by focusing on a Jamaican philosopher, Charles W.  Mills. Mills grappled with race as a social construction and made it the center of his political philosophy. He therefore constructed a philosophy of race. His classic work, The Racial Contract, published in 1996, had an impact on the North American academic world. The idea of the racial contract is a theory of race and European modernity, showing how the theme of race serves to normalize and universalize the construction of modern Western political hegemony. According to the author, his objective is to construct a method allowing us to understand the logic of domination and how it structures Western politics and beyond. In Western modernity, race is intimately linked to relationships of power and domination. Mills exposes how the domination of others was connected to the concept of race. The racial contract is a contract between those who are categorized as whites and non-​whites, non-​whites being the objects and not the subjects of this contract.41 The author underscores that the racial contract establishes a politics of race, a racialized state, and a racialized judicial system in which the status of whites and non-​whites is clearly spelled out within the laws or customs. The power of this state lies within its ability to reproduce and to maintain the racial order. Thus, the author exposes the racial nature of liberalism and modern politics. The author underscores that Western political philosophy does not take the centrality of slavery and imperialism into its accounts of Western history.42 The author maintains that traditional divisions within philosophy—​ metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and morality—​ do not take the idea of race into consideration. One can easily see the difference that the introduction of race into these fields makes. Thus, the incorporation of the idea of race in philosophy presupposes an epistemological and political rupture.

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Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse  27

Notes 1 See Mezilas, El trauma colonial, entre la memoria y el discurso. Pensar (desde) el Caribe (2015). 2 Heidegger, Hermenéutica, ontología de la facticidad, 42. 3 See Salinas-​Molins, Le Code Noir ou le calvaire du Canaan (1987). 4 See Logros, L’idée d’humanité (2006). 5 See Said, Cultura e imperialismo (1996). 6 See Arendt, L’impérialisme. Les origines du totalitarisme (2002). 7 See Césaire, Discurso sobre el colonialismo (2006). 8 See Fanon, Piel negra, máscaras blancas (2009). 9 See Fassin and Fassin, De la question sociale à la question raciale (2009). 10 See Zea, El positivismo en México, nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia (1993). 11 When Bolívar sought refuge in Haiti, it was a divided country; Alexandre Pétion was the president of the southern Republic of Haiti from 1811 to 1818 while Henry Christophe ruled the Kingdom of Hayti in the north from 1811 to 1820. 12 Hurbon, Comprendre Haïti, Essai sur l’État, la nation, la culture, 46. 13 See Pierre-​ Charles, El pensamiento sociopolítico moderno en el Caribe (1985). 14 Pierre-​Charles, El pensamiento sociopolítico moderno en el Caribe, 54. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Fardin, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne. XXe siècle, 154. 18 Ortiz, Los negros brujos, 46. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 See Price-​Mars, Ainsi parla l’Oncle (2004). 22 Glissant, L’intention Poétique, 141. 23 Glissant, Le discours antillais, 249–​250. 24 Ibid., 422. 25 Ibid., 423. 26 Ibid., 424. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Barnabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, Éloge de la créolité, 15. 34 Confiant and Chamoiseau, Lettres créoles,  73–​74. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Barnabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, Éloge de la créolité, 19. 38 Ibid. 39 See Rodriguez, Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana (2005). 40 Gonzalez, Braud, and Miguel, Política, Identidad y Pensamiento Social en la República Dominicana, 32. 41 Mills, The Racial Contract, 12. 42 See Mills, Blackness Visibility: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998).

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28  Glodel Mezilas

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. L’impérialisme. Les origines du totalitarisme. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Balaguer, Joaquin. La isla al revés. Haití y el destino de la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1985. Barnabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Éloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Césaire, Aimé. Discurso sobre el colonialismo. Madrid: Akal, 2006. Confiant, Raphaël. and Patrick Chamoiseau. Lettres créoles. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Fanon, Frantz. Piel negra, máscaras blancas. Madrid: Akal, 2009. Fardin, Dieudonné. Histoire de la littérature haïtienne. XXe siècle. Panorama du mouvement indigéniste, Tome 5. Port-​au-​Prince: Les Éditions Fardin, 2002. Fassin, Didier and Éric Fassin. De la question sociale à la question raciale. Représenter la société française. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2009. Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Gonzalez, Raymundo, Michel Braud, Pedro L. San Miguel and Roberto Cassa. Identidad y Pensamiento Social en la República Dominicana. Madrid: Doce Calles: Academia de Ciencias Dominicanas, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Hermenéutica, ontología de la facticidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998. Hurbon, Laennec. Comprendre Haïti. Essai sur l’État, la nation, la culture. Port-​ au-​Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1987. Leclercq, Cécile. El largato en busca de una identidad. Cuba: identidad, nación y Mestizaje. Madrid: Vervuert, Iberoamérica, 2004. Logros, Robert. L’idée d’humanité. Paris: Livre de Poche, 2006. Mezilas, Glodel. Haïti, les questions qui préoccupent. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2016. Mezilas, Glodel. El trauma colonial, entre la memoria y el discurso. Pensar (desde) el Caribe. Pompano Beach, FL: Educa Vision, 2015. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press, 1997. Mills, Charles W. Blackness Visibility: Essays on Philosophy and Race. New York: Cornell University Press, 1998. Ortiz, Fernado. Los negros brujos. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1973. Pierre-​Charles, Gérard. El pensamiento sociopolítico moderno en el Caribe. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985. Price-​Mars, Jean. Ainsi parla l’Oncle. Port-​ au-​ Prince: Collection du Bicentenaire, 2004. Rodriguez, Néstor E. Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 2005. Said, Edward. Cultura e imperialismo. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1996. Salinas-​Molins, Louis. Le Code Noir ou le calvaire du Canaan. Paris: PUF, 1987. Zea, Leopoldo. El positivismo en México, nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993.

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2  “Tous les hommes sont l’homme” Anténor Firmin, Toussaint Louverture, Racial Equality, and the Fact of Blackness Paul B. Miller The verses below are an excerpt from a poem by Tertulien Gilbaud called “Toussaint Louverture: A l’aspect de la flotte française” (1802), quoted in its entirety in Anténor Firmin’s De l’égalité des races humaines (1885). Et quel tryan, frappé d’une étrange démence, Pense encor retrouver des êtres tout tremblants Dans un peuple grandi jusqu’au niveau des blancs, Rèvant un destin grand comme le ciel immense? In another chapter of his book, the Haitian author and statesman (1850–​ 1911) sketches a brief biography of Louverture. Finally, on the opening page of the volume, the reader encounters a portrait of Toussaint as the frontispiece. Therefore, the allusions to the Haitian “founding father” abound in Firmin’s book and suggest an implicit, running referentiality. In his discussion of the poem about Louverture, Firmin is reviewing the emergent Haitian literary generation and presents Guilbaud’s poem as “proof of the intellectual evolution of the black race in Haiti” (436). The fact that he would enlist the literary accomplishments of the young nation to extol its evolutionary virtues is not surprising. There is a documented tendency among nineteenth-​ century Latin American intellectuals to vaunt their nations’ literary exploits in a kind of overcompensation for less spectacular achievements in industrial or economic areas of modern life (Beverly 10–​12). Firmin’s gesture of placing poetry on a civilizational pedestal aligns him with this general tendency. Many of the Haitian poets that Firmin praises are largely forgotten today. Such is the case of Gilbaud, of whom Firmin seems particularly fond: “J’avoue volontiers, j’ai toujours vu avec un vrai sentiment d’orgueil ce jeune écrivain dont les talents incontestables, l’esprit charmant et fin sont une protestation si éloquente contre la doctrine de l’inégalité des races humaines” (451). The poem that Firmin cites in his book is a convenient and revealing point of departure. For a contemporary reader of Césaire, Damas, Price-​ Mars, Roumain, and other poets of the Négritude period, Gilbaud’s poem, with its quatrains of alexandrines in embrassée rhyme, seems to embody a predicament that can help us understand the historical difficulties that

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30  Paul B. Miller Firmin faced as well: irrespective of its content (Toussaint Louverture in Guilbaud’s case), the poem’s form might appear to us as unapologetically assimilationist, an example of what Price-​Mars called “bovarysme collectif” in 1928. The stanza that I have quoted refers to the arrival of Leclerc in Saint-​ Domingue to reassert French control of the colony. In a verse that must have pleased Firmin immensely, the “tyrant,” expecting to find “trembling beings,” encounters instead a people who have been elevated to the level of whites and who dream of a destiny as vast as the sky. Can this dream of equality—​“grandi jusqu’au niveau des blancs”—​be realized without a degree of assimilation? With the clarity of historical hindsight, we can perceive this dialectic as the predicament that haunts Guilbaud’s aesthetics as well as Firmin’s anthropology. The arrival of Leclerc’s massive expedition to quash the colony’s burgeoning autonomy after Toussaint Louverture’s 1801 constitution is also a historical moment that dramatizes the wager of assimilation and is a profound topic for Gilbaud’s forgotten poem. As I will discuss presently, Louverture’s vision of autonomy at the same time entailed a renunciation of independence. The 1801 constitution, notwithstanding its progressive articles banishing slavery permanently, is itself replete with concessions that compromise the possibility of full equality and in fact curtail freedom: religious observance is strictly limited to Apostolic Catholicism; divorce is prohibited; and perhaps most egregious of all, Louverture is named governor for life. It is interesting to note (as a prelude to the theme I will address in greater detail) that the word égalité appears only once in the 1801 constitution and even then only indirectly, and certainly not in the sense that Firmin intended when he wrote about the equality of the human races. In this chapter I will attempt an overview of some aspects of Firmin’s arguments and rhetorical strategies in De l’égalité des races humaines,1 and, in keeping with the thematic focus of this volume, I  will situate this overview as well as the historical reception of Firmin in a comparative framework with his national forebear Toussaint Louverture—​ a comparison that is invited and justified by the strategic predominance of references to Louverture in Firmin’s book. This transhistorical constellation suggests that Louverture, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and Firmin, at its close, both ran up against the fact of whiteness, which, though with different contexts, objectives, and results, conspired against the dream of égalité for both compatriots. While for Louverture the stakes (his life), the adversary (Bonaparte), and the consequences (his death) were greater than for Firmin, I hope to show the situation of both men is comparable insofar as their attempt to seek acceptance and membership in the “club” of whiteness was futile (and, in the case of Louverture, fatal). Before pursuing this constellation, I  shall first attempt to contextualize Firmin’s presence and participation in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, the intellectual community with which Firmin’s book was in

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  31 direct dialogue (though as we will see, “monologue” might be the more appropriate word). In the 1880s, the Société included among its ranks at least three Haitians, Firmin (exiled in Paris from the government of Lysius Salomon); Louis-​Joseph Janvier, a doctor who studied medicine in Paris and who introduced Firmin to the Société; and the often overlooked Jean-​Baptiste Dehoux, a doctor trained in France who was also listed in the 1884 directory as “ancien directeur de l’École de medicine de Port-​au-​Prince.”2 The Société published an annual Bulletin that included a directory of its members, the proceedings of its bimonthly meetings including a transcription of the keynote lectures, along with a summary of the discussion that followed. Firmin’s name is first mentioned in the 1884 Bulletin as an applicant for membership. In the same year, the membership is granted. In the 1885 Bulletin as well as those that were published in the following three years, Firmin’s name appears in the directory under the heading “membres titulaires,” permanent or “tenured” members with the appropriate academic credentials. In 1885, in the meeting of October 1, the Bulletin notes the reception of De l’égalité des races humaines by the Société. But in the remainder of 1885 and in the years immediately following, there are no interventions by Firmin or any other member regarding his book; nor are there any reviews, acknowledgments, or mention of it. Some short reviews were published in other French mediatic outlets, but the mute reception and invisibility within Parisian anthropological circles, and certainly in the pages of the Bulletin, is at odds with the book’s central thematic relevance to the Société’s prime objective, expressed in the very first article of guidelines and procedural norms that appeared in the opening pages of every number of Bulletin: “ARTICLE 1ER.—​La Société d’anthropologie de Paris a pour but l’étude scientifique des races humaines.” Firmin’s monograph could not engage any more directly with this central thematic objective, “the study of the human races” and proffers substantial discursive interlocution with the thought of some of the most notable of the Société’s luminaries, such as its founder and most eminent member, Paul Broca, as well as other highly visible members such as Jean-​Louis Armand de Quatrefages and Paul Topinard. The silence that characterizes the reception of De l’égalité des races humaines is a mystery in the historical record. If the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, would admit Firmin, a Black Haitian, as a full-​ fledged member, despite the deeply rooted anthropological conviction of the time that the Black race was inferior to the white one, why would Firmin’s book elicit no response, review, or commentary from the Society’s members?3 Carolyn Fluehr-​Lobban, echoing Jean Price-​Mars, contrasts the icy reception of Firmin in a causal relationship with the roar of the Berlin Congress of 1884–​1885, in which the neo-​imperial powers of Europe parceled up Africa for their civilizing missions and colonial conquest (Fluehr-​ Lobban, xxxv). Firmin’s arguments, especially the long chapter asserting

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32  Paul B. Miller the specifically Black African racial demographic of ancient Egyptian civilization, “had provoked a scandal,” according to Price-​Mars, though it appears that he is speaking conjecturally (Price-​Mars, 155). In the historical record preserved by the Bulletins, the scandal is largely one of silence. While no doubt the vast majority of the members of the Société would have approved of these so-​called civilizing excursions into Africa, since they were convinced of the racial inferiority of its inhabitants, it seems unlikely to me that any of them saw in Firmin’s study a threat to the impending neocolonial order and would have therefore plotted to relegate Firmin to oblivion with a conspiratorial silence. A  more likely explanation for the dearth of formal responses to Firmin’s arguments was the almost violent manner in which they discursively disrupted—​the real scandal—​the established tenets of anthropological thought. In his apotheosis of Black ancient Egypt, his patient and rigorous debunking of the pseudoscientific conclusions stemming from craniometrics—​the gauging, measuring, and classifying of skulls as indicators of racial superiority or inferiority—​and above all, in his insistence on the evolutionary, changing nature of the world’s civilizations and the ethnicities that comprise them, Firmin’s arguments, had they received their due attention, would have undoubtedly shaken the foundations of anthropological knowledge in the 1880s and 1890s. I will return to the question of this muted response to Firmin’s monograph, but I would like to now turn my attention to some aspects of the book itself. It would not fit into the scope of this chapter to cover all of Firmin’s arguments in his expansive volume supporting the thesis of the equality of the human races, but I would like to briefly touch upon the question of the rhetorical register of the text. One of the most noteworthy rhetorical gestures repeatedly employed in De l’égalité des races humaines is Firmin’s tendency toward officious obsequiousness when discussing the works and thought of his fellow anthropologists in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris. He describes Paul Broca, who was convinced not only of the inferiority of the Black race (due to what he claimed were their smaller skulls) but also that Blacks and whites belonged to different species (the so-​called polygéniste theory), in the following manner: “Le docteur Broca était une des plus grandes intelligences qu’on puisse rencontrer” (54), “l’illustre Broca” (49), and so on. He employs similar epithets for other figures whose views on the Black race are less than flattering, “le savant M.  Topinard” (153), for example. Géloine identifies this tendency as “une ostentation facétieuse” (xvi). Yet gauging the degree of facetiousness or irony in these expressions of exalted respect is a complex matter. On the one hand there is no question that Firmin was himself flattered to be accepted as a titular member of the Société d’Anthropologie. In the copy of De l’égalité des races humaines presented to the Société, Firmin handwrote the following dedicatory inscription, “Hommage respectueux à la société d’anthroplogie de Paris,” employing a similarly exalted rhetoric the sincerity of which is not in doubt.

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  33 For Firmin, the stakes of racial equality are high. In fact, he wagers everything on it: Il paraît donc impossible d’accepter l’existence de races supérieures et de races inférieures sans reconnaître aux premières le droit de réduire les autres à la servitude, pourvu que la chose leur fasse utilité. (212) Firmin is saying in no uncertain terms that if it can be proven that one race is superior to another, then the subjection to servitude of the inferior race is not only altogether justified but an almost moral imperative. Therefore, the task of proving the equality of the races is of paramount importance to Firmin. We have to consider the urgency of this wager when weighing the rhetorical tools he employs to respond to the “eminent” members of the Société d’Anthropologie. He does not have the luxury that Montesquieu had, for example, in De l’esprit des lois, in the section titled “De l’esclavage des nègres” in which he simply parrots the pro-​slavery point of view with no indication of authorial intent or irony (133). That is why the use of honorary epithets to refer to the Société’s luminaries is sincere, even if some of them in turn may doubt Firmin’s human credentials. In the 1885 first edition published by F. Pichon, the frontispiece is a portrait of Toussaint Louverture, a fact noted by scholars but usually without further elaboration on its significance. The juxtaposition of Firmin and Toussaint—​the latter’s image on the left-​hand frontispiece in symmetrical contraposition to Firmin’s authorial imprimatur on the right-​hand title page—​is a suggestive one and signifies more than mere decoration or publicity. Firmin dedicates his book to Haiti: “en le dédiant à Haïti, c’est encore à eux tous que je l’adresse, les déshérités du présent et les géants de l’avenir” (v). It would seem therefore natural that the image of Toussaint Louverture, a “giant of the past” and certainly the most internationally famous of the Haitian “founding fathers,” would consecrate this patriotic address. Nevertheless, we should pause to consider in greater detail the significance of the frontispiece in Firmin’s book. The idea of this grouping of Louverture and Firmin as a nineteenth-​ century phenomenon is perhaps counterintuitive since Toussaint Louverture is generally regarded as an eighteenth-​century figure. In C.L.R. James’s study of the Haitian Revolution the portrait of him is that of the enlightened man par excellence, a reader of Abbé Raynal who achieved a greater degree of enlightenment than the greatest philosophers of the century of Enlightenment. But despite the fact that Toussaint Louverture was born and lived almost his entire life in the eighteenth century, the textual and iconographic legacy that has been bequeathed to us was fashioned according to a nineteenth-​ century epistemology. Vie privée, politique et militaire de Toussaint Louverture par un homme de couleur was published in 1802,4 quickly followed by biographies by Cousin d’Avallon

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34  Paul B. Miller and du Broca in 1802. William Wordsworth’s short poem “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” appeared in the London Morning Post on July 2, 1803. A litany of studies of the Haitian Revolution and biographical sketches appeared thereafter, culminating in the year 1850, in which Saint-​Rémy published his Vie de Toussaint Louverture (followed by his edition of Toussaint’s Mémories in 1853)  as well as a five-​act dramatic poem in verse published in the same year by Alphonse de Lamartine. Firmin, who cites Wendell Phillips’s 1860 speech about Louverture as a major source of biographical information is in fact much closer, historiographically speaking, to Toussaint than we might at first assume. Almost everything we know about Toussaint Louverture was in fact filtered through a nineteenth-​century  lens. Daniel Desormeaux provides just one example of the way this historiographic contextualization can affect the bequeathed perception of Toussaint Louverture. In his discussion of Saint-​Rémy-​published Mémoires and Lamartine’s poem, Desormeaux reflects on the possibility that anti-​ Bonapartist sentiment—​directed against Napoleon the nephew—​could partially explain a renewed sympathy for Toussaint Louverture, a tragic and innocent victim of Napoleon the uncle (142). Another example might be gleaned from Sankar Muthu’s strongly counterintuitive argument that much of Enlightenment philosophy was categorically anti-​imperialist in a way that the nineteenth century was not: “By the mid-​nineteenth century, anti-​imperialist thinking was virtually absent from Western European intellectual debate” (5). If the eighteenth-​ century Toussaint took the Enlightenment to a new level by putting Kant’s imperative of “autonomy at all costs” into praxis, Toussaint’s 1853 Mémoires portrayed to the nineteenth century a victim of Napoleonic imperial treachery. Firmin, though undeniably a “marginal figure” in the nineteenth century, was an unequivocal opponent of European imperialism and in fact theorizes that the facade of pseudoscientific racial inferiorization is predicated on the need for a discursive alibi to justify European colonialism and empire building: “Pour légitimer les prétentions européennes, il a bien fallu mettre en avant une raison qui les justifiât. On n’a pu en imaginer une meilleure que celle qui s’appuie sur la doctrine de l’inégalité des races humaines” (587). If C.L.R. James refers to the 128 shades of Blackness in eighteenth-​ century Saint-​ Domingue as the “tom-​ foolery” of color (38), Firmin confronts late nineteenth-​ century notions of racial superiority and inferiority that have been crystallized into so-​ called scientific knowledge. Firmin, like a faint voice from the deep well of nineteenth-​century Eurocentric racial thought, challenges the fallacies that underlie this knowledge, but not the idea of science itself as a mode of inquiry that will eventually unveil the truth. This ethical critique of European racism combined with an admiration and emulation of its technical achievements is a major point in common between Louverture and Firmin.

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  35

Figure 2.1 Lithograph of Toussaint Louverture by Nicolas Maurin (1838).

The portrait of Toussaint Louverture in the frontispiece of Firmin’s book was first published in Gragnon-​Lacoste’s 1877 biography. This portrait has been compared and contrasted on many occasions to the more widely reproduced likeness in the 1832 lithograph by Nicolas Maurin (see Figure 2.1): But juxtaposing these rival portraits anew in the context of Firmin and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris recasts their differences in another grammar. The Maurin lithograph represents Toussaint Louverture in profile, with hyperbolic features such as bulging eyes and an exaggeratedly jutting lower jaw suggesting, for some, a “racialization” despite the fact that historical observers apparently did in fact describe him in such terms. Both David Geggus as well as biographer and novelist Madison Smartt Bell find good reason to believe that the portrait may be a reasonable likeness. Nevertheless, for other commentators, notwithstanding the fact Toussaint Louverture was struck by a cannonball in the mouth in the 1790s and lost most of his teeth, which may or may not explain some of the exaggerated features in this portrait, the term one most often encounters when describing the image is “grotesque.” Patrick Sylvain opines that it was “Maurin’s 1832 grotesque lithograph that served as the commonly accepted visual representation of Toussaint,” and Imhotep Lesage minces

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36  Paul B. Miller

Figure 2.2 Image by Leboiteux from Montfayon’s lost original, published in Gragnon-​ Lacoste’s 1877 biography, included as frontispiece in Anténor Firmin’s De l’égalité des races humaines (1885).

no words in expressing what many have perceived: “Nicolas Maurin accentue délibérément ses traits, l’assimilant à un singe!” More to the point, in the context of these remarks, the two portraits in question represent polar physiognomic characteristics that were common references in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris and with which Firmin was intimately familiar. The jutting lower jaw in the Maurin lithograph represents a clear case of what nineteenth-​century anthropology classified as “prognathism,” commonly attributed to people of African descent (among others) and which was considered, in turn, a sign of racial inferiority. Firmin, who strongly engaged the craniometric and physiognomic notions of racial inferiority and superiority that were so ingrained in the nineteenth-​century anthropological imagination, chose instead the image of Toussaint Louverture allegedly by Montfayon (the original was lost) and reproduced by Leboiteux for Gragnon-​Lacoste’s book (Figure 2.2) to inaugurate his monograph on the equality of the human races. This image depicts Toussaint in an almost diametrically opposed fashion to Maurin’s. Here the Haitian founding father is portrayed as “orthognathic,” or straight-​jawed. In addition to the classification of jaw types (orthognathic or prognathic), there was also a veritable frenzy in French anthropology after

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  37 1860 to measure, gauge, and classify the maximum quantity of human skulls, the most notable division being between a perceived elongated narrow skull (dolichocéphale), which presumably characterized non-​ white races, and a roundish, more capacious one (brachycéphale) enjoyed by those ethnicities inhabiting Europe. We can also see these two traits represented in the respective portraits of Toussaint. Bell observes that in the second portrait by Montfayon, “his forehead is very high and his cranium remarkably large” (292–​293), corroborating the classification as brachycéphale for the members of the Société, who apparently recognized this distinction as easily as we might distinguish blue eyes from brown. An unnumbered page at the beginning of Gragnon-​Lacoste’s volume makes an authenticity claim about the Montfayon portrait by citing a letter from Isaac Louverture, the general’s son, who says that only in this portrait can he recognize “the expression and face of his father” as well as his modest uniform (“son costume de petite tenue”). Nevertheless, like Maurin’s lithograph, Montfayon’s likeness should probably be taken with a grain of salt as well. His general physiognomy appears to have undergone a “whitening” in the words of Geggus; the aforementioned Sylvain and Lesage make the same complaint, that Montfayon renders Louverture “almost Caucasian.” And yet Toussaint, according to Wendell Phillips, one of Firmin’s prime sources of biographical information, was an “unmixed negro, with no drop of mixed blood in his veins” (121). Similarly, in the preface to his book, Firmin makes a comparable racial claim about himself. Je suis noir. D’autre part, j’ai toujours considéré le culte de la science comme le seul vrai, le seul digne de la constante attention et de l’infini dévouement de tout homme qui ne se laisse guider que par la libre raison. (XII) The perhaps unexpected qualifier “d’autre part” sets in apparent opposition the two ideas: that the speaker can feasibly claim to be at once Black and also a man of science. This is another link to the Toussaint portrait by Montfayon Firmin included as the frontispiece to his book. In it, Toussaint clutches a telescope or spyglass in his right hand, which not only emblematizes his military prowess as legendary general but also links him to an enlightenment Weltanschauung and the tools and techniques of civilizational advancement. There is no question, if one is familiar with the arguments set forth in Firmin’s book regarding the relationship between race and civilizations, that such a symbolism would have exercised a powerful attraction on him and would have been particularly appropriate when one considers Firmin’s “scientific” interlocutors at the Société d’Anthropolgie de Paris. The question of skin color and its signification is an interesting point of comparison between Toussaint and Firmin. I  have already observed

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38  Paul B. Miller that Firmin declares his Blackness in the book’s preface; elsewhere, when debunking some of the more absurd racial myths taken for scientific fact by the illustrious members of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, Firmin again auto-​ indexes his own Blackness as a testimonial and counterargument to their absurdity. For example, Firmin cites Quatrefages, who asserts that men belonging to the Black race perspire less than whites. Firmin’s gentle debunking of this silly fable might be considered rhetorically characteristic: “Je suis noir et n’ai rien qui me distingue anatomiquement de pur Soudanien. J’ai cependant une transpiration assez abondante” (88). Elsewhere Firmin must also expose the long-​held mythical belief that the skin of people of African descent exudes a black oily substance (77). In addition to the frontispiece representing Toussaint Louverture, there is a section of Firmin’s book devoted to him in the chapter titled “Rapidité de l’évolution dans la race noire.” In the introduction to this chapter Firmin reiterates one of his major points, that sub-​ Saharan Black civilization is “inferior” compared to European civilization at the present time, but that this developmental backwardness cannot be taken as a sign of racial inferiority: “il faut donc se garder de croire que cette longue incapacité est le signe d’une infériorité organique” (529). Incidentally, this acknowledgment of inferior and superior civilizations (as opposed to races) is a useful barometer to situate Firmin vis-​à-​vis the Négritude movement that would emerge 50 years after the publication of De l’égalité des races humaines. Firmin is often referred to as a Négritude precursor, but his manner of argumentation, which engages and valorizes scientific reason as something to be aspired to rather than excoriated as a mode of oppression certainly seems to qualify him as “pre” rather than “proto” négritude. His style of engagement entails and perhaps necessitates a reverential attitude toward the anthropological cognoscenti of his day that would have probably been anathema to the practitioners of Négritude. In this chapter Firmin goes on to enumerate some extraordinary Haitians who, in his view, are a testament to the capacity of a race to evolve rapidly from a state of degradation to a high degree of civilization. He names Toussaint Louverture as “above them all, even above Dessalines” and refers to him as the most eloquent proof of the “native superiority” of the Black race. This “top-​down” approach that emphasizes the exploits of heroic men is certainly in keeping with a nineteenth-​century view of history. Those familiar with Haitian historiography know that this flattering portrait of Toussaint Louverture is common but not unanimous. Many historians and biographers, especially those sympathetic to Rigaud and the mulatto class, such as Beaubrun Ardouin, were critical of or ambivalent about Toussaint, including Saint-​ Rémy, specifically cited as one of Firmin’s sources. Firmin, however, sides unequivocally with Toussaint against Rigaud, and the most important sources for his account are among the

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  39 most hagiographic—​Gragnon-​Lacoste’s 1877 biography (from whence the Montfayon portrait is taken) and Wendell Phillips’s 1860 speech from which Firmin cites long passages. I believe there are at least three reasons for Firmin’s reliance on Phillips’s text. First of all, and least interesting, is its succinctness—​it is a transcription of a one-​hour speech that Phillips gave in 1861. Firmin’s book is 660 pages, and a biographical sketch of Toussaint Louverture could rapidly become voluminous. As though to acknowledge his constraints, Firmin intimates, “Nous ne faisons pas ici de l’histoire” (548). Second of all, the speech was translated into French by his friend, the Puerto Rican Ramón Betances, who likely made him aware of it in the early 1880s. Thirdly, the aspect of Toussaint Louverture that the abolitionist Wendell Phillips most strongly emphasized was his race, an emphasis that more than suited Firmin’s purpose. In a racial logic closely resembling that of Firmin, Phillips begins his speech in the following manner: I am engaged to-​night in what you will think the absurd effort to convince you that the negro race, instead of being that object of pity or contempt which we usually consider it, is entitled, judged by the facts of history, to a place close by the side of the Saxon. (121) Firmin concludes this section with a hagiographic flourish. He says that he could name many extraordinary Black men from the United States to Liberia, and from the heart of Africa, whose genius leaves nothing to be desired when compared to the most brilliant “Caucasians,” but what is the point of listing them? They are all eclipsed by the brilliance of Toussaint Louverture (558–​559). Firmin’s apotheosis of Louverture is problematic since it is contradictory to make an argument about racial equality by emphasizing the heroic superiority of an individual. Firmin’s tendency to uphold these superior individuals as metonymic representatives of an entire race leaves him open to a predictable critique, one that was concisely articulated in an 1889 review of his book by the Comte de Charencey: “Qu’un nègre homme d’esprit soit supérieur à un Français imbécile, nous ne le contestons pas; mais il s’agirait, au point de vue intellectuel, de comparer la moyenne des deux races” (336). Both Firmin and Toussaint Louverture experienced specific episodes in the historical record involving their skin color and the adversarial way that it was perceived by the French, which form a revealing juxtaposition. It is well known that when Toussaint Louverture was duped into a rendezvous with Lelerc’s general Brunet in 1802 he was arrested in brutal fashion; the entire episode is recounted in one of the most moving sections of his Mémoires. “Ils me garrotèrent comme un criminel” (81). His house was pillaged and burned, the occupants, family members and domestic servants, forced to flee into the woods. In his letters to Napoleon, Louverture complains about this abuse and wonders if he would have

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40  Paul B. Miller been treated with the respect worthy of his rank and accomplishments had his appearance been different: Il [Leclerc] a au contraire agi envers moi avec des moyens qu’on n’a jamais employés même à l’égard des plus grands criminels. Sans-​ doute je dois ce traitement à ma couleur; mais ma couleur [...] ma couleur m’a-​t-​elle empêché de servir ma patrie avec zèle et fidélité? La couleur de mon corps nuit-​elle à mon honneur et à ma bravoure? [85] Four times in this passage Louverture refers to his color. What is the rhetorical intention and effect of this repetition or poetic gradation? I  would venture to say that as he languished away in a French prison cell in the Jura mountains near the Swiss border, reflecting on his downfall, Toussaint’s refrain, “ma couleur,” connotes a desperate incredulity that color prejudice had reduced him to this abject state; disbelief that it would come down to this that after an entire career of concessions and compromises on the race question in Saint Domingue starting with the white planters in 1791. By the time he was at the peak of his power, James observes, “Losing sight of this mass support, taking it for granted, he sought only to conciliate the whites at home and abroad” (262). Despite Toussaint’s attempts to appease whites at every turn, in the privileges accorded to them in Saint-​Domingue, in the members of the constitutional committee, once in France, “the fact of blackness” would yield him no quarter. “As long as the black man remains on his home territory, except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to experience his being for others,” as Fanon observes in his now-​classic essay (89). Though he was not speaking of Toussaint Louverture rotting away in the dungeon of La Joux, the words are chillingly applicable. But now fast-​forward almost exactly ninety years to April of 1892. I have already touched upon the circumstances of the publication of Firmin’s book De l’égalité des races humaines in 1885, and the silence that characterized its reception. Through the rest of the 1880s Firmin’s name is mentioned regularly in the Bulletin as a member in good standing but there are no presentations by him, nor does he intervene in any of the discussions. From 1889 to 1891 Firmin’s name is absent from the directory of the Société since he was occupied in Haiti with the turnover of presidents Salomon and Légitime. Much transpires in Haiti in 1889 (the centennial of the French Revolution): most famously, Firmin had a face-​to-​face encounter with special US envoy Frederick Douglass to negotiate the US annexation of Môle Saint Nicolas, an imperialist move foiled primarily by Firmin. But by 1892, Firmin is back in Paris not as an exile but as secretary of finance and foreign relations under President Florvil Hyppolite (Price-​Mars, 246). To review the chronological time line: Firmin became a member of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1884; De l’égalité des races humaines was published in 1885 and in the same year the Société noted in its

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  41 bulletin the reception of Firmin’s book. From 1889 to 1890, he apparently let his membership lapse, since he is not mentioned in the directory during those years, no doubt embroiled in the political turmoil taking place in Haiti. However, by 1891 his name appears anew, no longer listed as a “membre titulaire” as in the 1880s, but now under the category of “membre titulaire résidant à l’étranger.” Moreover, the words “membre à vie” are indicated in bold letters after his name. The reason I indicate the minutiae of Firmin’s membership in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris during this period is because, if the years immediately following the publication of his book were characterized by the silence of its reception and the silence of Firmin himself, in 1892 he breaks it quite spectacularly. In the preface to his book, Firmin reflects on his state of mind as he became a member of the Société and realized that the despicable notion of the inequality of the human races was deeply ingrained in a society of such learned men and women. J’aurais pu, dès la fin de l’année dernière, à la reprise de nos travaux, provoquer au sein de la Société une discussion de nature à faire la lumière sur la question, à m’édifier au moins sur les raisons scientifiques qui autorisent la plupart de mes savants collègues à diviser l’espèce humaine en races supérieures et races inférieures; mais ne serais-​je pas considéré comme un intrus? (IX) Perhaps the same diplomatic impulses that Firmin would put to use four years later to head off an American takeover of Môle Saint Nicolas in Haiti persuaded him in his inaugural presence in the Société that it would be best to hold his tongue. Attentive to decorum, Firmin’s intervention would take the form of a book. For whatever reason, after the years of attending meetings at the Société and hearing one presentation after another about the inscription of racial inferiority on the physiognomy and physiology of human beings, in the meetings of April 7 and 21, 1892, Firmin speaks. On April 7, Félix Regnault presented a lecture about the inferiority of races that live in the mountainous interior compared to the superior races that inhabit the coasts (Regnault formulated this idea on a personal trip to India where he observed the “racial” differences between Mongolians and Indians). Clémence Royer, the French translator of Darwin and a firm believer in the inequality of the races (and for whom Firmin expresses an unequivocal misogynistic disdain in his book), responds that she has often held this opinion about the differences between mountain and coastal people. But Firmin disagrees, expressing a point of view that sounds perfectly reasonable today, but which must have sounded radically utopian in the stodgy lecture hall of the Société. He remarks that one speaks far too often about superior and inferior races as though these were irrevocable facts, when in reality there are people whose greater or

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42  Paul B. Miller lesser degrees of civilization result from their environmental and historical circumstances. When these circumstances change, races can attain a great degree of intellectual and civilizational achievement. None of the other respondents addressed these beautifully stated remarks, and the discussion returned to the theme of inferior mountain dwellers and superior coastal inhabitants. The exchange, though, as pointed as it was, was a prelude for a more explosive one two weeks later, on April 21. The topic under now discussion was a presentation by M.  Lajard, “The Iberian Race,” about the sizes, shapes, facial angles, capaciousness, and cephalic index of the skulls found notably in the Portuguese ossuaries, the Canary Islands and the Azores. The respondent, Regnault, summarizes that a race’s or ethnicity’s cephalic index (the ratio of a skull’s width to its length), the holy grail of French anthropology during the years in question, was not something unchangeable, but rather “soumis à l’influence du milieu” (1892, 327). This idea, that the cephalic index of a race could evolve over time depending on external circumstances, set off a veritable firestorm of reaction. Royer reiterates her favorite meme, that she cannot permit the influence of the environment on the form of the skull. Léonce Manouvrier, one of the very few, perhaps the only of the sociétaires to write a serious review of Firmin’s book (published in Revue Philosophique de la France et de L’Étranger in 1886), declares that even though the presenter had not proven the effect of environmental factors on the shape of the skull, that is no reason to deny the possibility. Arthur Bordier responds that if this possibility existed, then our entire notion of ethnography would be overturned. Firmin then speaks, according to the minutes of the meeting: M. Firmin croit que le milieu a une grande influence. Après avoir démontré ce que l’on doit entendre par milieu, il y associe les conditions de situation sociale. Pour lui, c’est un facteur qu’il ne faut pas négliger. (329) It is unfortunate that we do not have a more precise record of Firmin’s explanation of what he meant by environment, or milieu, but it is already clear from De l’égalité des races humaines that Firmin was a firm believer in the idea that the physical aspects of racial groups can evolve with their exposure to “civilization.” From this point, the discussion digresses into a comparative treatment about which cranial shape, dolichocephalic (longish) or brachycephalic (roundish), was more prominent with the undisguised implication that the former, with a lower cephalic index, was inferior to the latter. Gabriel de Mortillet points out that African Blacks are dolichocephalic while Asian Blacks are brachycephalic; therefore, not all Blacks are dolichocephalic, and that the same is true about monkeys. Just as the discussion is degenerating into a comparative craniometric treatment of Africans and monkeys, Bordier drops his bombshell on

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  43 Firmin, asking him in a rare ad hominem address if there were no whites among his ancestors. Firmin responds that it would not be surprising to find a few drops of white blood (“une parcelle de sang blanc”) in his genealogy, but that in no way does he attribute his intelligence to them. Bordier, undeterred, responds that it is not impossible that Firmin’s white ancestors had contributed to the shape of his skull and were the cause of his intelligence. Manouvrier, who had acknowledged the possibility of the environmental impact on the cephalic index, goes so far as to encourage Firmin to submit to measurements, and encourages him to persuade his Black acquaintances in Paris to do the same. Perhaps Firmin was correct to stay silent all those years. What is most remarkable about this episode is that, once he takes the long-​deferred decision to intervene in one of the Société’s discussions, the anthropological gaze is turned toward him and he becomes an object of inquiry to be in turn measured and classified. Unlike Toussaint, Firmin is not in a jail cell, repeating to himself, “my color, my color”; to the contrary he is a full-​fledged member in good standing of a prestigious intellectual society. Nevertheless, the remarks geared toward him, “your color, your skull, your ancestors, your black brethren,” reveal quite explosively just how problematic and alienating this “belonging” was. It confers upon his membership status, “membre à vie,” another nuance of meaning. For Firmin’s concluding chapter, he provides an epigraph from Victor Hugo: “Tous les hommes sont l’homme” (650). I  began this chapter by quoting from the poet Tertulien Garibaul, forgotten today but for his inclusion in Firmin’s book. About this generation of poets, Firmin remarks, “Ils se croient si peu des Victor Hugo que, le plus souvent, ils sont incapables de surmonter la timidité que l’on éprouve à affronter la rude épreuve de la publicité” (441). Firmin’s metaphor sets up an analogy of extremes, the absolute obscure marginality of the Haitian poets he is discussing compared to the canonical international celebrity that is associated with Hugo. And yet, “Tous les hommes sont l’homme,” the title of a poem by the most well-​known French writer of the nineteenth century resonates strongly with the common Haitian Kreyol proverb, “tout moun se moun.” It is difficult to say whether or not Firmin was acquainted with this common Haitian proverb, and even more difficult to determine whether or not Toussaint Louverture was familiar with it, despite Nick Nesbitt’s claim that he was. But the semantic resonance between the two phrases strongly suggests a universal vision of equality that Toussaint Louverture introduced to colonial Saint-​Domingue, and which it was Anténor Firmin’s life work to perpetuate.

Notes 1 If we created a ranking of books based on the ratio of their historical, cultural, and literary value on the one hand, versus the degree to which they been unjustly forgotten by posterity on the other, then De l’égalité des races

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44  Paul B. Miller humaines would surely finish near the top of the list. This 660-​page tome was published in Paris in 1885. Though some recent scholars have come a long a way toward restoring Firmin to his rightful place in the Atlantic intellectual tradition, notably Carolyn Fluehr-​Lobban for an Anglo-​American academic readership and Ghislaine Géloine for our French counterparts (both of whom introduced new editions of the book) along with North America-​based scholars such as Daniel Desormeaux, more work needs to be done to recognize Firmin. (It should be noted, however, that Haitian intellectuals have never neglected their august countryman and that the lion’s share of essays and biographies about Firmin are indeed written by Haitians, such as Jean Price-​Mars, Pradel Pompilus, Leslie Péan, and Celucien Joseph.) 2 In 1884, Dehoux presented a lecture at a meeting of the Société on an isolated ethnicity, apparently a maroon society, living in the mountains of Haiti called “Les Viens-​Viens.” 3 With the exception of Léonce Manouvrier, as Ghislaine Géloine notes. 4 Though the volume is dated 1801 on the title page, David Geggus observes that some of the events the volume recounts occurred in early 1802.

Bibliography Bell, Madison Smartt. Toussaint Louverture. Random House Digital, 2009. Beverly, John. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Charencey, Comte de. “De l’égalité des races humaines: Anthropologie Positive.” A. Firmin.” Revue des Questions historiques Bulletin Bibliographique, July 1, 1889. 336–​338. Cousin d’Avallon. Histoire de Toussaint-​Louverture. Paris: Pillot, 1802. Desormeaux, Daniel. “The First of the (Black) Memorialists: Toussaint Louverture.” Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 131–​145. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Tr. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Firmin, Anténor. De l’égalité des races humaines: Anthropologie positive. Paris: F. Pichon, 1885. Firmin, Anténor. Lettres de Saint-​Thomas: études sociologiques, historiques et littéraires. Port-​au-​Prince: Editions Fardin, 1986. Fluehr-​Lobban, Carolyn. “Introduction.” Firmin, Anténor. The Equality of the Human Races: (positivist Anthropology). Tr. Asselin Charles. New  York: Garland, 2000. Geggus, David. The Changing Faces of Toussaint Louverture: Literary and Pictorial Depictions. Brown University. http://​www.brown.edu/​Facilities/​ John_​Carter_​Brown_​Library/​toussaint/​pages/​historiography.html. Online resource. Géloin, Ghislaine. “Introduction.” Firmin, Joseph-​ Anténor. De L’égalité Des Races Humaines : Anthropologie Positive. Paris: Harmattan, 2003. Gragnon-​Lacoste, Thomas-​Prosper. Toussaint-​ Louverture, général en chef de l’armée de Saint-​Domingue, surnommé le premier des noirs. Paris: Durand, 1877. Himelhoch, M. “Frederick Douglass and Haiti’s Mole St. Nicolas.” The Journal of Negro History 56 (1971): 161–​180.

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“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”  45 James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1963. Lajard. “La race Ibère (crânes des Canaries et des Açores)” In Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, IV° Série. Tome 3, 1892. pp. 294–​330. Lamartine, Alphonse de. Toussaint Louverture: poème dramatique. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1850. Lesage, Imhotep, “Toussaint Louverture et son vrai visage.” http://​imhoteplesage. wordpress.com/​2013/​01/​11/​toussaint-​louverture-​et-​son-​vrai-​visage/​. Miller, Paul B. “Remoteness and Proximity: The Parallel Ethnographies of Alejo Carpentier and René Maran.” Symposium 66.1 (2012): 1–​15. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. Oeuvres De Montesquieu. Ed. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. Paris: A. Bavoux, 1825. Muthu, Sankar. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003 Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Péan, Leslie. Comprendre Anténor Firmin : Une inspiration pour le XXIe siècle. Port-​au-​Prince: Éditions de Université d’État de Haïti, 2012. Phillips, Wendell. Lectures and Speeches. New  York; London: Street and Smith, 1902. Price-​Mars, Jean. Anténor Firmin. Port-​au-​Prince: Impr. Séminaire adventiste, 1964. Saint-​Rémy, Joseph. Mémoires de général Toussaint-​Louverture, écrits par lui-​ même. Paris: Pagnerre, 1853. Saint-​Rémy, Joseph. Vie de Toussaint-​L’Ouverture. Paris: Moquet, 1850. Sylvain, Patrick. “Is this the authentic face of Toussaint L’Ouverture?” Boston Haitian Reporter. http://​www.bostonhaitian.com/​2011/​authentic-​facetoussaint-louverture. Vie privée, politique et militaire de Toussaint Louverture par un homme de couleur. Paris: Magasin de Librairie, 1801. Wordsworth, William. “To Toussaint L’Ouverture.” In Select Poems of William Wordsworth, Ed., William J. Rolfe. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889: 89.

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3  Reinventing Europe Joseph Anténor Firmin and the Legacy of the Nineteenth Century1 Gudrun Rath

When I  write these lines, families and friends in Hanau, Germany, are mourning their relatives, murdered in a racist killing on February 19, 2020.2 The first decades of the twenty-​first century have given rise to a revival of white supremacist thought and nationalist movements in Europe as well as in the Americas. Within the European Union, “racism and ethnic discrimination remain at levels that raise serious concern.”3 It is thus evident that racism does not belong to the past, and neither does the category “race.” The latter continues to haunt everyday life as well as scientific realms. As the anthropologist Jean-​François Véran states, “it has been impossible to bury this past, and it has become obvious that in spite of claims about its scientific irrelevance, the heritage of raciology cannot simply be dismissed, at least in its political consequences and continuities.”4 It is thus only logical that relatives and organizations in the aftermath of the racist killings in Hanau have called for societal and political change.5 In academia, demands such as those made in Germany remind researchers working on the history of scientific racism of the fact that a critical exploration of this past has not yet come to a closure. It must, on the contrary, continuously be kept on the academic agenda, requiring critical reflection of how the past keeps trickling into the present, as well as new perspectives and counternarratives. In light of these developments, a reexamination of publications such as Haitian diasporic author, diplomat, and politician Joseph Anténor Firmin’s De l’égalité des races humaines, a text that stood up to anthropology’s physical anatomic methods and racialization at a very early stage, seems more than urgent, and not just to imagine “alternative histories”6 and provide a different view of the nineteenth century. “What would a world without prejudice look like? Would presuppositions of racial superiority always be present in scholarly thought, although their falseness had already been proven?”7 At the end of the nineteenth century, when Firmin wondered about the future of racial ideologies while living in the French capital, such thoughts still belonged to “utopian futures.”8 Today, the “revolution of love,”9 leading to a “future beyond race”10 that Firmin and other

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Reinventing Europe  47 Caribbean diasporic intellectuals such as Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances envisaged, is not only still pending, but seems to have drifted into a far-​away, ungraspable future.11 This chapter discusses how nineteenth century racist ideologies were contested and shaped a current of thought that has recently been named “Haitian Atlantic humanism.”12 It argues that Haitian diasporic thinkers not only put their birthplace and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution at the center of their work, but also actively intervened in intellectual circles on the European continent. In this chapter, this reexamination will thus lead us to ask: How can the critical reflections of the past provide a frame for contemporary positions? And how can the “utopian futures” envisaged in the past be reactivated for the present?

“le crâne, il reste muet” In 1885, only two years after his arrival in Paris, Joseph Anténor Firmin published De l’égalité des races humaines. In Haiti, Firmin had studied law and been a successful attorney and politician in Cap-​Haïtien and Caracas before moving to Paris as a diplomat, where he stayed until 1888, when he briefly returned to Haiti for political purposes.13 Back in Paris in 1891, he continued to form part of its intellectual community both on a national as well as on a transnational level. As the title indicates, Firmin’s book De l’égalité des races humaines was clearly directed against Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines dating from 1853.14 In his text, de Gobineau famously argued for a golden age of “Arianism” that was inexorably in decline, and the superiority of whites over Blacks.15 Firmin’s publication, however, was not merely targeted against de Gobineau. His systematic study provided his readers with a general overview of the most established European and American scientific positions –​which comprised, among others, the Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist Carl von Linné; French naturalist Georges-​Louis Leclerc; Comte de Buffon; German physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann; German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach; Kant; and Goethe.16 It also presented the different positions intellectuals took in contemporary debates such as monogenism versus polygenism, that is, the discussion whether humankind had one or multiple origins, the question of hybridity and its moral and physical effects, or the debate on whether physical differences between humans should lead to the conclusion that humankind consisted of different “species.” However, Firmin’s analysis was not only a detailed survey of different intellectual positions, but also a targeted critique. Although the title  –​ and the posterior popularity de Gobineau’s publication achieved –​might suggest the contrary to present-​day readers, de Gobineau was not the primary target of the book.17 Due to its precise structural frame, within which every argument is followed by a counterargument, Firmin’s study can be related to juridical rhetoric: De l’égalité des races humaines is a

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48  Gudrun Rath written objection to the majority of scientific positions of the era, specifically of the ones held by most members of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris. Firmin had been elected as a member of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1884, where, along with Paris-​based Haitian diasporic intellectual Louis-​Joseph Janvier, he was among the first Black members.18 The Société d’Anthropologie de Paris had been founded in 1859 by the French anatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca. Although not the first organization that sought to promote this emerging academic discipline in Europe, the Société was the first scholarly association to use the term anthropologie and became the most acknowledged anthropological institution in nineteenth-​ century France, with around three hundred seventy members in the 1890s.19 Decades before “anthropology” would be recognized as an academic discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, the Société placed its focus on “anthropology” as a natural science, especially racializing physical anthropology.20 Its members employed methods such as anthropometry and craniometry in the comparative and racializing interpretation of human physical data, which “viewed the inferiority of the black race as an incontestable fact.”21 The anatomically based methods developed by members of the Société were put to the test on a large collection of skulls and other human remains, partly still property of today’s Société d’Anthropologie.22 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, and others would introduce a shift toward sociological parameters by promoting the study of what they named ethnologie, in opposition to the direction the Société d’Anthropologie had been establishing.23 Firmin’s admission to the Société d’Anthropologie had been arranged by three other members. French physician Ernest Aubertin, French anthropologist and archeologist Gabriel Mortillet, and Haitian-​diasporic anthropologist and intellectual Louis Joseph Janvier nominated him as a new member whereupon he was elected “with majority vote by secret ballot of the society.”24 His admission has to be seen within the developments that had taken place in the Société after Broca’s death, when Paul Topinard, assistant director of the Broca laboratory and his protégé, was trying to appropriate Broca’s legacy and take over the institution. One of his main opponents was Gabriel Mortillet, who “sought to shift anthropology’s emphasis away from biological questions and towards problems of prehistory, archeology, and sociology.”25 His “theoretical agenda had clear ideological and practical implications: anthropologists must reject the ideal of pure science, commit themselves to furthering progress and transform their discipline into an applied science of society.”26 Topinard, on the contrary, like Broca, insisted that anthropology should remain neutral on ideological and political questions.27 The confrontation between the Mortillet group and Broca’s self-​declared successor Topinard, thus was not only theoretical but also ideological, and Firmin’s admission to the society can be seen as an effort by the Mortillet group to give the Société a new direction.28

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Reinventing Europe  49 Firmin’s essay therefore not only confronted de Gobineau, but was also a “groundbreaking critique of scientific racism,”29 a fierce attack on the views most members of the Société held, along with the ‘scientific’ methods they had developed.30 Firmin’s analysis was especially directed against the legacy of the then already deceased Broca. Firmin’s own definition of the discipline as “positive anthropology” in the subtitle of his study as well as his personal approach differed from the consensus on racial hierarchies most of his colleagues had reached and can be situated within the efforts of a renewal of anthropology colleagues such as Mortillet were making. In his positions Firmin, however, went far beyond Mortillet, who did not entirely reject Broca’s legacy.31 De l’égalité des races humaines is also a critique of the one-​sidedness of anthropological methods of the era. Beyond physical data, Firmin incorporated cultural, social, linguistic, historical, and archaeological dimensions into his study, which in this respect predates posterior anthropological approaches such as the one developed by Franz Boas by decades.32 Firmin’s repudiation of compared craniometry –​the measurement of human skulls, that ultimately resulted in parallels drawn between size of skull, brain, and intelligence, which had been particularly promoted in France by Broca and his successors  –​concerned not only the comparison of but also, more fundamentally, the attempt to classify human physical data at all.33 According to Firmin, any attempt of classification could only be arbitrary and was always led by subjective criteria, trying to impose order where nature had put its “most capricious irregularity.”34 It was thus only logical that different scientists had established different systems of classification, thereby causing a “fluctuation” of arbitrary classifications.35 What was at stake was, according to Firmin, not only anthropology’s reputation but science itself: Les anthropologistes, en étudiant la forme et le volume du crâne, cherchent surtout à découvrir les différences qui existent entre les races humaines, après [sic] avoir assigné arbitrairement à chaque race une certaine forme ou une certaine capacité crâniennes spéciales. Plus tard, il est vrai, on s’appuiera sur ces mêmes spécialisations pour proclamer que telle race est inférieure ou supérieure à telle autre; mais cette conclusion, sans avoir plus de poids que celle des phrénologistes, ne sera pas moins revêtu d’un semblant scientifique.36 While de Gobineau, with his well-​known publication from 1853, had preceded the foundation of the anthropological society, its members, rather than questioning de Gobineau’s hypothesis, had, according to Firmin, “imagined” scientific practices in order to confirm, mainly on a physical basis, the superiority of whites in comparison to non-​whites.37 This also held true for other comparative methods from the “arsenal of anthropology” that only led to an “imagined comparative proceeding.”38 In the end, all of the established approaches in craniometry were in vain,

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50  Gudrun Rath Firmin argued: One could twist and turn the skull, it still remained silent.39

“Tous les hommes sont l’homme”: Haitian-​Atlantic Humanism, Revisited For Firmin, comparative anatomy was not the only anthropological method that showed too many insufficiencies.40 His critique also targeted comparisons of attributions concerning moral judgment, grades of civilization, or evolution. For the author, comparisons of physical, moral, or other non-​physical attributions were clearly “comparaisons imaginées dans le but d’établir ou de consolider la doctrine de l’inégalité des races humaines.”41 According to the author, these comparisons did not work out because historical factors and probable future progress were not considered sufficiently. As Michael Dash has rightfully argued, “Firmin’s main thesis is not essentialist but universalist as he sees the differences between cultures and civilizations as not based on any innate, genetic qualities but historical and material conditions are used to explain cultural difference and evolution.”42 His understanding of race, consequently, is equally based on historical and social factors rather than biological ones.43 While Firmin did not go so far as to completely renounce the concept of “race” ’ –​in consistence with the consensus of his era –​he vehemently disputed the idea of a “purity” of races as well as the “anti-​philosophical and pseudo-​scientific” idea of racial inequality.44 For Firmin, the insistence on the inequality of human races clearly served only one purpose: the legitimization of enslavement and servitude, as well as men’s exploitation by men.45 Science, the author argued, had made itself an “accomplice” to the “dumbest prejudice” and to the “most unjust system,” either due to “flattery” or due to “insufficiency of observation.”46 If anthropology only served to proclaim that Black men were destined to serve white men, Firmin insisted, he had the full right to say to this “false anthropology”: “Non, tu n’es pas une science!”47 Firmin’s own concept of science was clearly shaped by the values of the Enlightenment, above all, reason. But also, other references, such as the achievements of progress and civilization and Comte as an alternative reference give us some insight into Firmin’s ideas.48 At the same time, Firmin also denounced false condemnations of enslavement in Europe. As the author argued, such condemnations could only be contradictory when they were brought forward while simultaneously maintaining the argument of the “comparative inequality” of human races.49 This critique was explicitly directed at anthropologist Paul Broca who, according to Firmin, only condemned slavery because it did not fit into the theory of a polygenistic origin of humanity. Firmin’s argument can still be reactivated today and brought forward to the twenty-​ first century’s descriptions of Broca’s work that relativize the dimensions

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Reinventing Europe  51 of his scientific racism by referring to his anti-​slavery positions and his engagement for the republican left.50 In accordance with the title of his publication, Firmin came to the following conclusion: les hommes sont partout doués des mêmes qualités et des mêmes défauts, sans distinction de couleur ni de forme anatomique. Les races sont égales; elles sont tous capables de s’élever aux plus nobles vertus, au plus haut développement intellectuel, comme de tomber dans la plus complète dégénération. […] C’est qu’une chaîne invisible réunit tous les membres de l’humanité dans un cercle commun.51 This, the author argued with Victor Hugo’s famous words, “Tous les hommes sont l’homme,” was where his argument was leading up to. He closed his study with the biblical invitation to love one another.52 It is by no means by chance that the first edition of De l’égalité des races humaines showed an image of Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, on the second page.53 Undoubtedly, Haiti and the intellectual legacy of the Haitian Revolution were at the heart of Firmin’s argument. Scientific racist positions of the era, among others de Gobineau, often used Haiti and the outcome of the Haitian Revolution “as proof of black incapacity for self-​government, but Firmin and other Haitian intellectuals of his generation turned that logic on its head. Haiti was exemplary, yes –​ exemplary of black equality, achievement and potential.”54 This becomes particularly clear when we consider the dedication that opens Firmin’s study: De l’égalité des races humaines is dedicated to Haiti, but also to all the “children of the black race”; “love of progress, justice and liberty”; and to the “dispossessed of the present and the giants of the future.”55 At a moment when new European colonial expansions were being undertaken on the African continent, Firmin thereby underlined the importance of Haitian history as a symbol for and motor of universal equality and liberty in the future.56 In this regard, De l’égalité des races humaines is a precursor of Firmin’s later transnational political argument for an “Antillean confederation” as well as a new “geographic imaginary where metropolitan France and post-​ independence Haiti […] are no longer opposed.”57 Firmin’s position can be situated within the wider context of what has recently been named “Haitian-​Atlantic humanism,” that is, “a long-​ standing way of thinking about eradicating the problems of racism and slavery through and from the nation state of Haiti, but also in collaboration with European and American world powers.”58 For centuries, the Haitian Revolution has been regarded as an “exceptional event” that could be discarded or “silenced” from official records.59 In scholarly research outside of Haiti, this perception has shifted since the increase of international interest in the Haitian Revolution during the bicentenary; a development that ultimately led to the “Haitian turn.”60 Within this

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52  Gudrun Rath context, scholars have focused on the universal importance of the Haitian Revolution and have emphasized its significance as part of a “modernity disavowed” as well as part of “universal history.”61 However, within history of knowledge, currents of “Haitian-​Atlantic humanism” have often been overlooked. Only recent research has highlighted the contribution of nineteenth-​century Haitian diasporic intellectuals to “hemispheric,”62 cross-​cultural thought, normally attributed to writers such as Cuba’s José Martí or Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, as well as their importance for Pan-​Africanism and Pan-​Americanism and the transatlantic space, decades before writers such as Édouard Glissant or Paul Gilroy brought forward ideas on the “poetics of relation” or the “Black Atlantic.”63 Indeed, Firmin is not the only Haitian intellectual residing in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century whose contribution, both in his publications and in his intellectual life, to the shaping of “cross-​cultural” thought has been widely ignored. The same holds true for other Haitian-​ diasporic intellectuals of his generation, such as Louis Joseph Janvier, author of La République d’Haïti et ses visiteurs (1883). Janvier was one of the members of the Société d’Anthropologie who made Firmin’s election possible. He had been trained as a medical doctor and anthropologist in France and collaborated with intellectuals such as the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher or Ramón Emeterio Betances in a collaborative work, Les détracteurs de la race noire et de la république d’Haïti. He was an acknowledged member of intellectual circles in the French capital and was close to the Parnassians Charles Leconte de Lisle, Judith Gautier, and Stéphane Mallarmé.64 Firmin and Janvier, like other intellectuals of the era, used Paris as a “strategic site for spreading their political messages and as a locus of community that brought together Latin American exiles alongside French liberals.”65 As Michael Dash has argued, these intellectuals thus employed a “strategy of performative cosmopolitanism.”66 Within this performance, however, –​whether intentionally or not –​Europe was given pride of place.

Intruding into Europe’s Space and Time? How, then, has it been possible that the reexamination of these intellectuals has been (and still is) undertaken mostly within a national frame, classifying them as “Haitian” intellectuals and reading their work as part of a “Haitian” canonical history of knowledge, while both their established position within intellectual circles in Europe as well as their work on and with transnational communities proves this view untenable?67 How come, at the same time Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines was not only translated into English almost immediately after its first publication but also edited as an “Oxford classic,” as late as 1966, after having served as an inspiration for Nazi ideology, Firmin’s De l’égalité des races humaines had to wait until 2002 for a translation

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Reinventing Europe  53 into English (not to mention a German edition)?68 Most certainly, all of these indicators point to the fact that Europe, on the one hand, has for a long time been –​and still is –​conceived as the opposite of the Caribbean; a position that seems even more untenable given the fact that not only Europe’s colonial past but also some present parts of the European Union are geographically situated in the Caribbean.69 On the other hand, this past and current history of reception of intellectuals such as de Gobineau and Firmin sheds light on the desire (or the unconsidered implication) to think of Europe as a space of “purity,” within which intellectual positions that stood up to and spoke out against the ideological framework of scientific racism from a position of transnational entanglements seemed and still seem unthinkable.70 Consciously or not, the continuous reception of de Gobineau and the marginalization of counterpositions such as Firmin’s –​even by academics critical of scientific racism –​has thus perpetuated the arguments of scientific racism and promulgated the view of the European intellectual space as well as European scientific communities of the nineteenth century as only conceivable within national parameters. That the legacy of scientific racism is still present today also becomes clear through a view on the current development of the fields of research it originated from. Although in the evolvement from physical to biological anthropology its “heavy responsibility for having produced a raciology that scientifically endorses the division of humanity”71 has been critically reflected by researchers in the field, its original involvement in the production of these theories can no longer be negated –​even more so when forensic anthropology, one of its present-​day scientific outcomes, still uses the instruments developed by Broca in the nineteenth century.72 It thus seems contradictory when the history of forensic anthropology is, on the one hand, traced back to the nineteenth century as a linear development from Broca to the present in several phases, while on the other hand, this connection is downplayed through the imagery of family lineage, through which forensic anthropology is shaped as a “sister” rather than as a “daughter” of physical anthropology.73 In recent years, other lineages have raised dust of the nineteenth century’s anthropological collections, when descendants of people whose human remains were kept in these collections have stepped forward to claim restitution, reparations, and official apologies for crimes that directly linked European colonial expansion to the scientific ideas and methods of the past. In 2014, in a complicated legal procedure, the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris restituted the skulls of rebel chief Ataï and of his companion from the South Pacific island New Caledonia that to the present day is, as French collectivité sui generis. In 1878, Ataï had been beheaded for rebelling against the French colonial regime.74 Ataï’s skull had formed part of the Société’s collections after being depredated by an officer of the French marine corps and had been anatomically prepared by Broca. When twenty-​ first-​ century research claims Broca’s and the

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54  Gudrun Rath Société’s craniological collection to be “riche de plus de 4900 pièces,”75 it becomes clear that the nineteenth-​century view imposed on human remains like Ataï’s skull is still at least partially present today, consciously or not. In the ceremony of restitution, Berge Kawa, the chief’s direct descendant, stated: “These remains bring us back to our own reality […] We were ravaged by the French state. It is therefore up to the French state to give us back our property.”76 Although the skulls remain silent, one could argue following Firmin, the voices of their descendants need to be heard.77 In his introduction, Firmin acknowledged that, while attending the Société d’Anthropologie’s discussions on the inequality between human races, he had come to the conclusion that counterarguments could only be brought forward in written form, for he felt he would have been regarded an “intruder” if he had directly expressed his arguments in the discussions.78 The result of this process was De l’égalité des races humaines, a work of almost seven hundred pages that was published by the Parisian publisher Cotillon. Firmin’s decision has ultimately made his objections more durable; it has provided a persistent and more effective form of ‘intrusion’ from within the European intellectual communities of the nineteenth century –​an “intrusion” that can still be reactivated for the present. It also gives some rare evidence of the fact that the history of knowledge of the nineteenth century should be reconsidered beyond national boundaries. Europe’s past, after all, has always been subjected to transnational entanglements. And this also holds true for its present and future, despite claims to the contrary.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter has been published as “Contesting Inequality. Joseph Anténor Firmin’s De l’égalité des races humaines, 133  years on.” Forum for Inter-​American Research 12.1 (June 2019), 21–​28. 2 Christoph Schmidt-​ Lunau. “Hanau nach dem rechten Anschlag.” TAZ, February 26, 2020. https://​taz.de/​Hanau-​nach-​dem-​rechten-​Anschlag/​ !5664375/​. 3 The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights report comes to the disillusioning conclusion: Seventeen years after the adoption of the Racial Equality Directive and nine years after the adoption of the Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia, immigrants and minority ethnic groups continue to face widespread discrimination, harassment and discriminatory ethnic profiling across the EU, as the findings of FRA’s second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-​MIDIS II) show. The European Commission supported EU Member States’ efforts to counter racism and hate crime through the EU High Level Group on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance. It also continued to monitor closely the implementation of the Racial Equality Directive and of the Framework Decision. Although several EU Member States have been reviewing their

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Reinventing Europe  55 anti-​racism legislation, in 2017 only 14 of them had in place action plans and strategies aimed at combating racism and ethnic discrimination. FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). Fundamental Rights Report 2018, 8. Accessed January 28, 2020. http://​fra.europa.eu/​ en/​publication/​2018/​fundamental-​rights-​report-​2018-​fra-​opinions. 4 Jean-​ François Véran. “Old Bones, New Powers.” Current Anthropology, The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks, vol. 53, no. S5 (2012), S246. 5 Bundeskonferenz der Migrantenorganisationen. “Offener Brief an Bundeskanzlerin Merkel.” Accessed February 26, 2020. www.tgd. de/​ w p-​ c ontent/ ​ u ploads/ ​ 2 020/ ​ 0 2/ ​ 2 60220_​ O ffener-​ B rief-​ d er-​ M O-​ a nBundeskanzlerin-Merkel-​2.pdf 6 Kahlil Chaar-​Pérez. “ ‘A Revolution of Love’: Ramón Emeterio Betances, Anténor Firmin, and Affective Communities in the Caribbean.” The Global South, vol. 7, no. 2 (2013), 29. 7 Anténor Firmin. De l’égalité des races humaines : Anthropologie positive. Paris: Cotillon, 1885, 661. 8 Chaar-​Pérez, A Revolution of Love, 29. 9 Chaar-​Pérez,  11. 10 Michael Dash, “Nineteenth-​ century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s Letters from St. Thomas.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 35, no. 2 (2004), 49. 11 Ramón Emeterio Betances, Puerto Rico’s leader of independence, coined the term “revolution of love” to refer to “revolutionary communities.” See Chaar-​Pérez, A Revolution of Love, 14. 12 Marlene Daut. “Caribbean ‘Race Men’: Louis Joseph Janvier, Demesvar Delorme, and the Haitian Atlantic.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 56, no.  1 (2016),  9–​23. 13 Yves Chemla. Anténor Firmin. Accessed January 28, 2020. http://​ile-​en-​ile. org/​firmin/​. Fluehr-​Lobban, Carolyn. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, vol. 102, no. 3 (2000), 450. 14 Laënnec Hurbon. Le Barbare imaginaire. Sorciers, zombis et cannibales en Haïti. Paris: Cerf, 1988, 65. 15 Chemla, Anténor Firmin; Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 449; Michael Banton, “The Idiom of Race. A  Critique of Presentism.” In Theories of Race and Racism. A  Reader, Edited by Les Back and John Solomos, London: Routledge, 2000 [1980], 55. 16 Gordon K.  Lewis. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1983, 317. 17 Bernasconi, Robert. “A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a Philosopher against Racism.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 4–​5 (2008), 372. 18 As Robert Bernasconi notes, a third member from Haiti, the physician Jean-​ Baptiste Dehoux, had been elected as a member in 1883. Bernasconi, 365. 19 Wartelle, Jean-​ Claude. “La Société d’Anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920.” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, vol. 10, no. 1 (2004), 126; Elizabeth Williams. “Anthropological Institutions in Nineteenth-​ Century France.” Isis 76, no.  3 (Sep., 1985), 331. Ethnological societies had previously been founded in Paris in 1839, in London in 1841, and in New York in 1842. See Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 453.

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56  Gudrun Rath 20 Williams, Anthropological Institutions, 331–​333; Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 453. 21 Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 453; see also Bronwen Douglas, and Chris Ballard. Foreign Bodies. Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–​1940. Canberra: ANU Press, 2008, 56ff. 22 François Marchal, Anne Nivart, A.  Fort, Yann Ardagna, and Dominique Grimaud-​ Hervé. “La restitution des têtes osseuses d’Ataï et de son compagnon.” Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 28 (2016), 101. 23 On Rivet’s role in the establishment of ethnologie as a counterposition to the Société (that does not take notice of previous counterpositions like Firmin’s), see Christine Laurière. “De la collaboration à l’affrontement: les relations de Paul Rivet avec la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1902–​années 1930).” Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 22 (2010),  17–​23. 24 Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 453. 25 Williams, Anthropological Institutions, 337. 26 Williams, 337. 27 Williams, 337. Véran has recently pointed to the entanglement between anthropology as a supposedly “hard science” and political involvement. Véran, Old Bones, New Powers, S247. 28 The conflict between Mortillet and Topinard was ultimately taken to court, where Topinard  –​without success  –​tried to achieve reinstatement to his dismissal from the Ecole faculty. Williams, Anthropological Institutions, 337. 29 Murphy, Kieran. “Haiti and the Black Box of Romanticism.” SiR vol. 56 (2017), 38. 30 Haitian anthropologist Jean-​ Price Mars has argued in his biography of Firmin’s life that this must have been a “cruel paradox” (cited in Fluehr-​ Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 453). 31 Williams, Anthropological Institutions, 337. 32 Watson Denis. “Review: The Equality of the Human Races. (Positivist Anthropology) by Anténor Firmin and Asselin Charles.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (2006), 332. 33 For an overview of anthropology’s relation to the body, see Anthony Synnott and David Howes. “From Measurement to Meaning. Anthropologies of the Body.” Anthropos, vol. 87, no. 1./​3. (1992), 147–​166 ; see also Douglas and Bronwen, 2008. 34 Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines, 23. 35 Firmin, 26; 40. 36 Firmin, 180. 37 Firmin, 213. 38 Firmin, 228. 39 Firmin, 229. 40 Firmin, 495f. 41 Firmin 215; emphasis added. 42 Dash, Nineteenth-​century Haiti, and the Archipelago of the Americas, 47. 43 Denis, Review: The Equality of the Human Races, 328. 44 Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines, 95; 204) 45 Firmin 209; 204.

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Reinventing Europe  57 6 Firmin, 489. 4 47 Firmin, 230. See also Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 451; Denis, Review: The Equality of the Human Races, 333; Murphy, Haiti, and the Black Box of Romanticism, 38. 48 Bernasconi, A Haitian in Paris, 376. 49 Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines, 204f. 50 This description can be found on the website of the current Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, under a section entitled “Histoire de la SAP”: “Il est parfois le reflet des préjugés de son temps (il croit en la hiérarchie des ‘races’) mais est aussi un homme engagé, évolutionniste convaincu, lié aux libres-​penseurs, anti-​esclavagiste et sénateur de la gauche républicaine.” www.sapweb.fr/​index.php/​la-​societe/​histoire.html 51 Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines, 661–​662. 52 Firmin, 662. 53 Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 460. The image is not included in the 1885 edition of the French National Library that was used for this chapter. 54 Kate Ramsey. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 95. 55 Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines, v. 56 Firmin, xvi. 57 Dash, Nineteenth-​century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas, 50; see also Chaar-​Pérez, A Revolution of Love, 2013. 58 Daut, Caribbean “Race Men,” 12; emphasis in original. 59 Michel-​Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. 60 Celucien Joseph. “ ‘The Haitian Turn’: An Appraisal of Recent Literary and Historiographical Works on the Haitian Revolution.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 5, no. 6 (2012), 37–​55. 61 Michael Dash. “Haïti Chimère. Revolutionary Universalism and its Caribbean Context.” In Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks, 9–​19. Edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-​ Hackshaw, Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2006. Sibylle Fischer. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Susan Buck-​Morss. Hegel und Haiti. Für eine neue Universalgeschichte. Translated by Laurent Faasch-​Ibrahim. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011 [2009]. 62 Dash, Nineteenth-​century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas, 45. 63 Along with other Paris-​based Haitian diasporic intellectuals such as Bénito Sylvain, Firmin attended the First Pan-​ African Conference in London in 1900. Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 460. 64 Yves Chemla. Louis Joseph Janvier. Accessed January 28, 2020. http://​ile-​ en-​ile.org/​janvier/​. On Janvier as a transnational intellectual, see also Daut, Caribbean “Race Men.” 65 Chaar-​Pérez, A Revolution of Love, 27. 66 Dash, Nineteenth-​century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas, 47. 67 Intellectual positions such as Firmin’s have been marginalized within the history of knowledge for decades. A  reexamination in Haiti and, to a lesser extent, also elsewhere in the Americas and in Europe in the twentieth century has been made possible by the insistence of farsighted –​mainly Haitian

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58  Gudrun Rath or Haitian-​diasporic  –​intellectuals. See Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 449. 68 Denis, Review: The Equality of the Human Races, 325f.; Fluehr-​Lobban, Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology, 450. 69 Shalini Randeria and Regina Römhild. “Das postkoloniale Europa: Verflochtene Genealogien der Gegenwart  –​Einleitung zur erweiterten Neuauflage.” In Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts-​und Kulturwissenschaften, 9–​31. Edited by Sebastian Conrad et al., Frankfurt: Campus, 2013. 70 On the afterlives of “race” in contemporary France, see Tyler Stovall, “Universalismo, diferencia e invisibilidad. Ensayo sobre la noción de raza en la historia de la Francia contemporánea.” Translated by Eva Montero and Hasan G. López Sanz, Pasajes, no. 44 (2014), 6–​30. 71 Véran, Old Bones, New Powers, S247. 72 Eugénia Cunha. “Some Reflections on the Popularity of Forensic Anthropology Today.” Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 22 (2010), 190. 73 Dennis Dirkmaat, L.L. Cabo, S.D. Ousley, and S.A. Symes. “New Perspectives in Forensic Anthropology.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 137 (2008), 46. Cunha, Some reflections, 191. Research has shown the involvement of forensic methods in the production of “truth,” despite claims of forensics as a “hard science.” See Eyal Weizman (2017), Forensic Architecture. Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, New York: Zone Books. 74 François Marchal et  al., La restitution des tétes osseuses d’Ataï et de son compagnon, 101. 75 François Marchal et al., 101, emphasis added. 76 Cascone, Sarah. “France Returns New Caldonian Rebel Chief’s Skull.” Artnet News, August 29, 2014. https://​news.artnet.com/​art-​world/​francereturns-​new-​caldonian-​rebel-​chiefs-​skull-​89168 77 The Société apparently expects more restitutional claims in the future, as they have prepared a legal procedure for how to react in the case of restitution claims. See François Marchal et al., La restitution des tétes osseuses d’Ataï et de son compagnon, 103. 78 Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines, viii.

Bibliography Anderson, Stephanie. “ ‘Three Living Australians’ and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1885.” In Foreign Bodies. Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–​ 1940, 229–​255. Edited by Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, Canberra: ANU Press, 2008. Banton, Michael. “The Idiom of Race. A Critique of Presentism.” In Theories of Race and Racism. A Reader, 51–​63. Edited by Les Back and John Solomos, London: Routledge, 2000 [1980]. Bernasconi, Robert. “A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a Philosopher against Racism.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 4–​5 (2008), 365–​383. Braziel, Jana. Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in Haitian Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Reinventing Europe  59 Buck-​Morss, Susan. Hegel und Haiti. Für eine neue Universalgeschichte. Translated by Laurent Faasch-​Ibrahim. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011 [2009]. Chaar-​Pérez, Kahlil. “ ‘A Revolution of Love’: Ramón Emeterio Betances, Anténor Firmin, and Affective Communities in the Caribbean.” The Global South, vol. 7, no. 2 (2013), 11–​36. Chemla, Yves. Anténor Firmin. Accessed January 28, 2020. http://​ile-​en-​ile.org/​ firmin/​ Chemla, Yves. Louis Joseph Janvier. Accessed January 28, 2020. http://​ile-​ en-​ile. org/​janvier/​ Cunha, Eugénia. “Some Reflections on the Popularity of Forensic Anthropology Today,” Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 22 (2010), 190–​193. Dash, Michael. “Haïti Chimère. Revolutionary Universalism and its Caribbean Context.” In Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, 9–​19. Edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-​Hackshaw, Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2006. Dash, Michael. “Nineteenth-​century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s Letters from St. Thomas.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 35, no. 2 (2004), 44–​53. Daut, Marlene. “Caribbean ‘Race Men’: Louis Joseph Janvier, Demesvar Delorme, and the Haitian Atlantic.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 56, no. 1 (2016), 9–​23. Denis, Watson. “Review: The Equality of the Human Races. (Positivist Anthropology) by Anténor Firmin and Asselin Charles.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (2006), 325–​334. Dirkmaat, Dennis, Cabo, L.L., Ousley, S.D. and Symes, S.A. “New Perspectives in Forensic Anthropology.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 137 (2008),  33–​52. Douglas, Bronwen and Ballard, Chris. Foreign Bodies. Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–​1940. Canberra : ANU Press, 2008. Firmin, Anténor. De l’égalité des races humaines: Anthropologie positive. Paris: Cotillon, 1885. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Fluehr-​Lobban, Carolyn. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, vol. 102, no. 3 (2000), 449–​466. FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). Fundamental Rights Report 2018. Accessed January 28, 2020. http://​fra.europa.eu/​en/​publication/​ 2018/​fundamental-​rights-​report-​2018-​fra-​opinions Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la relation: Poétique III (vol. 3). Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Hurbon, Laënnec. Le Barbare imaginaire. Sorciers, zombis et cannibales en Haïti. Paris: Cerf, 1988. Janvier, Louis-​Joseph et al. Les détracteurs de la race noire et de la République d’Haïti, précédé de lettres de Victor Schœlcher et de Ramón Emeterio Betances. Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1882. Janvier, Louis-​Joseph. Un peuple noir devant les peuples blancs. (Études de politique et de sociologie comparées). La république d’Haïti et ses visiteurs

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60  Gudrun Rath (1840–​1882), Réponse à M. Victor Cochinat (de la Petite Presse), et à quelques autres écrivains. Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1883. Joseph, Celucien. “ ‘The Haitian Turn’: An Appraisal of Recent Literary and Historiographical Works on the Haitian Revolution.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 5, no. 6 (2012), 37–​55. Laurière, Christine. “De la collaboration à l’affrontement: les relations de Paul Rivet avec la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1902–​années 1930).” Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris vol. 22 (2010), 17–​23. Lewis, Gordon K. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1983. Marchal, François, Nivart, Anne, Fort, A., Ardagna, Yann, and Grimaud-​Hervé, Dominique. “La restitution des têtes osseuses d’Ataï et de son compagnon.” Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris vol. 28 (2016), 100–​105. Murphy, Kieran. “Haiti and the Black Box of Romanticism.” SiR vol. 56 (2017),  37–​54. Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Randeria, Shalini and Römhild, Regina. “Das postkoloniale Europa: Verflochtene Genealogien der Gegenwart  –​Einleitung zur erweiterten Neuauflage.” In Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts-​ und Kulturwissenschaften, 9–​31. Edited by Sebastian Conrad et al., Frankfurt: Campus, 2013. Stovall, Tyler. “Universalismo, diferencia e invisibilidad. Ensayo sobre la noción de raza en la historia de la Francia contemporánea.” Translated by Eva Montero and Hasan G. López Sanz, Pasajes, no. 44 (2014), 6–​30. Synnott, Anthony and Howes, David. “From Measurement to Meaning. Anthropologies of the Body.” Anthropos, vol. 87, no. 1/​3 (1992), 147–​166. Trouillot, Michel-​Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Véran, Jean-​François. “Old Bones, New Powers.” Current Anthropology, The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks, vol. 53, no. S5 (2012), S246–​S255. Wartelle, Jean-​Claude. “La Société d’Anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920.” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, vol. 10, no. 1 (2004), 125–​171. Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture. Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. New York: Zone Books, 2017. Williams, Elizabeth. “Anthropological Institutions in Nineteenth-​Century France.” Isis 76, no. 3 (Sept. 1985), 331–​348.

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4  The Sense of Place in Firmin’s Monsieur Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et de la République d’Haïti Georges Eddy Lucien Translated by Nathan H. Dize and Siobhan Meï

Firmin’s work is the subject of numerous studies and is taken up through various points of entry. But, until now, the link between his work and geography has rarely been addressed, even though his use of a geographical lexicon, to weaken Gobineau’s thesis or to revisit the history of the United States from its beginnings, has consistently been a feature of his writing. To a certain degree the geographical spirit that inhabits his work has been rendered abstract by the existing literature. This applies not only to the geographical concepts mobilized in Firmin’s work, but also the position of and curiosity about geographers that animate his writing. This chapter aims to shed light on the contours of Firmin’s geographic notion of culture by highlighting the different meanings represented by the places he evokes.

Place, a Carefully Considered Fabrication Reading or rereading Firmin is an invitation to explore the idea of place in all of its dimensions. Place is, before all else, a geographic location, identifiable, but unfixed. Place is a construction in time. Place is built and recomposed; for Firmin, every place has a history. The United States is an example. With modes of strategic action coupled with opportunism and rigor, the US is both the moment and the condition of taking over place. Those early days when the United States was taking its very first steps seem important in terms of understanding the nation’s contemporary trajectory. As Firmin underscores, “we’re addressing English colonization, from which a great nation was to emerge.”1 Every place has its specificities, that is to say, its site, its unchanging coordinates, and its situation, all of which is in constant recomposition due to contact or connection. In sum, English colonization, with all of its induced elements, reconfigured the physiognomy of each of its provincial groups. These became “the great

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62  Georges Eddy Lucien nation so powerful and so confident—​both in its current strength and in the development of its grand future.”2 Effectively, as Anténor Firmin continues, the perspicacious sociologist will only have to closely examine the original formation and particular physiognomy of each provincial group in order to understand their subsequent evolution as part of an irreversible movement of national cohesion and economic expansion. This movement is driven by a political spirit for which no historical parallel exists.3 The spatial relationships that give rise to this territory do not come about randomly. They arrive at a particular moment. “In the seventy-​six years that went by, from 1498 to 1576, England showed no real desire to establish a domain in the vast regions of the New World.”4 Then, through the thrust of Protestantism protected by Queen Elizabeth, England did everything possible to expand and conquer the Americas. From this perspective, “the navy received incredible support, at the same time as industry and agriculture led to progress that increased public fortunes and gave the English people an expansionist strength yet to be seen until that time.”5 The colonial exploration and exploitation that followed were not in fact creations that came from above. They came from circumstances emanating from contact. They existed as attributes from the very first moments of great discoveries. The English empire is akin to a territorial empire, in the sense that North America is a space appropriated and organized through metropolitan power. This empire was equipped with a hierarchical administration of personnel and a system of taxation that progressively became unified and permanent. In these conditions, Firmin views the concept of place as a modern state in construction. Additionally, Firmin places emphasis on two active elements of metropole that make appropriation possible: a vision of geographic space and data on resources available from the appropriated place. As noted, “They knew that the colonies constituted a vast expanse: that they were far beyond the seas, that they produced many things that the English needed to buy and that they consumed the things that the English wanted to sell.”6 This description from Elisée Reclus of Saint Domingue is illuminating in this regard, as it indicates an inventorial interest in even the smallest details of resources available for appropriation in the area: Better irrigated and at a much more varied relief, Saint-​Domingue is even more rich in plant species than the marvelous Cuba; and among its sister islands, it gleans new plants from the Old World. The interior is not yet deforested and the forests that cover the mountain slopes, for thousands of square kilometers, still contain the precious “dye woods” in abundance: rosewood, ironwood, bois de satin and mahogany, pines and oak trees.7

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  63 Cuba, like Saint-​Domingue, offers similar or comparable advantages. These are useful places. As Firmin notes: The plant species that are of most interest in the context of international exchange is cotton (Gossypium). Cacao (theobroma cacao) introduced in 1729, campeche logwood (Hoematoxyloncampechianum), smoke tree (Rhuscotinus), roughbark lignum-​ vitae (Guaiacum officinale). A  crop that is cultivated in Haiti on a large scale, next to coffee, is sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum). Introduced to the island around 1506, sugar cane is used to produce tafia, the principle alcoholic drink consumed in the country, and it is used to generate an excellent rum from brown sugar, turbinado sugar and even refined sugar.8 In Saint-​Domingue like everywhere else, the metropole imposed the principle of the colonial pact, meaning that agricultural products and raw materials were exported from the colonies. Under these conditions, the metropole kept the production of value added for itself. In fact, everything that outfitted the colony (roads and production and refinery equipment) was oriented toward the interests of the metropole, revealing two notions of place: one of accumulation and one of extraction Furthermore, appropriated places feature cultural particularities. The repertoires of culture and production of Saint Dominigue are also nourished by new plants and animals imported from other continents, making it a mosaic or creolized space. If from the reign of plants, we turn to the reign of animals, we find that Haiti is just as rich and precious as its flora. Livestock and work animals are found in great numbers in Haiti, part of which dates back to the era of discovery and the rest from the beginnings of Spanish and French colonization. Cows, goats (Copra), pigs (Sus domesticus), horses, donkeys, and dogs have acclimated themselves without difficulty, undergoing transformations that have allowed them to adapt to the climate without altering their general or specific characteristics.9 An examined place is a useful place that meets the needs of the prospector. Henry Hudson takes pride in his discovery. He rejoices in his success, convinced that he has made one of the most beautiful discoveries in the New World.10 Effectively, “he returned to the bay of New York, which he claimed in the name of Holland. He soon set sail for Europe, where he reported on the unexpected results of his expeditions.” The Dutch East India Company and the whole country of Holland were pleased to hear of this trip and its results. This is because the place “discovered by Hudson was populated with mammals with fur. A clientele base for the sale of fur articles had been identified in Russia.”11

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64  Georges Eddy Lucien Relatedly, the way in which flora and fauna populate an area is not different in Haiti than in the US. The population of space leads to the crossroads of several different peoples from diverse backgrounds. The place that emerges is a creolized place. Firmin explains that “Immigrants were drawn there (to New Jersey) due to liberal conditions accorded by the new landowners, granting them a five year grace period before having to pay rent on the land they worked.”12 Further, he explains, “In 1683, with Elizabethtown as its capital, the colony experienced a notable increase in its population due to the arrival of the Covenanters, or the Scottish Presbyterians, who greatly contributed to the colony’s economic development.”13 Observably, “Francis Drake organized a new expedition by choosing mostly those who were accompanied by their families along with the tools necessary for the cultivation of land and everything else that could contribute to the prosperity of the colony.”14 This is how Firmin explains colonization through population growth. He emphasizes the adventures of the pioneers who settled in the colony, put down roots, and encouraged (through policies incentivizing population growth, tools of labor and so on) everything that would allow them to draw the maximum profit from usable space. They took control of land, imposed forced labor and a division of labor. Furthermore, this shows that the appropriated space is the crossroads of various peoples and cultures. The Black people who were transported to the colony of Saint-​ Domingue were people who came from entirely different regions within equatorial and equinoctial Africa. Leaving the north of the Black continent. Sossos met one another, pell-​mell, in the slave markets of the colony.15 They were taken from various areas in Western Africa and made to travel over one thousand kilometers from the seventeenth parallel south all the way to the northernmost latitudes of the Americas. Along the Slave Coast, people were taken from Congo and Angola, who were divided into various ethnic groups including les Congos-​Mayonmbés, les Congos-​Moussombés, and les Moudongues. In East Africa, Black people, called les Quilois, les Quiriams, and les Montfiats, were taken from the coast of Mozambique.16 The place that developed (Saint-​Domingue) was simply Africa in miniature. The population of Saint-​Domingue meant the bifurcation of the African plains from the African plateaus, the African forests from the Africa of the savannah, Christian Africa from Muslim Africa. Saint-​ Domingue is, with respect to its dimensions, the condensation of Africa, a land of differences, similarities, and various types of ecosystems. Saint-​ Domingue is the carrefour at which people met, from civilizations and cultures as distinct as the “Senegalese, the Yolofs, the Foulahs (Peuls or Poulards), Bambaras, the Mandingues, the Bissagots or the Blacks of the Gold Coast, including the Aradas, the Socos, the Fantins (Fants or Pahouins) the Captaous, the Mines, and the Agoués.”17 In this sense, appropriated spaces are the theaters for the appropriation of space.

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  65 Africans of the plains or the plateaus came with their own ways of building societies. They all collided at the point of arrival (Saint-​Domingue). They progressively assimilated to give rise to a space that reflected the contact of many ways of living and many different languages.

Place in the Eyes of the Other In language, Firmin saw a factor that would limit strongly identitarian groups. He also wrote, “As a result of the more or less closed-​off nature of life within tribes or clans (and the subsequent formation of restricted ethnographic islands), the study of African languages has been inconsistent and arbitrary and has not presented cases of linguistic assimilation.”18 Yet, both language and culture are important markers in the identification of the African person as a worker. They are sites through which connections to others are forged, specifically those who experience the same living conditions in the colony. Integration into the place of arrival was a complex process. For a new arrival to Saint-​Domingue, the process of belonging is initiated through speech acts. These speech acts are veritable acts of identity that correspond to a dual process of identification: the establishment of group belonging and the affirmation of a specific identity. The newly arrived person thus both signals their belonging to a group of enslaved people and affirms their specific position as an unpaid worker, differentiating themselves from those who profit from the slavery system. However, Firmin is quite unsympathetic. He uses the languages of European metropoles as a landmark, while, at the same time, considering African languages as tribal tongues. The study of African languages has shown very few cases of linguistic assimilation like those found in, for example, the classification of European languages. Without becoming instruments for the intercommunication of the ideas and sentiments of the diverse people who speak them, Anglo-​Saxon, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic languages share a sufficient amount of contact (even after parsing out all the speculation about Aryanism) that luckily it is possible to find a few words with a close or similar meaning in two or three completely distinct languages. This is not the case for African languages.19 To a certain extent then, Firmin interprets colonized space with regard to Western landmarks. The language of the enslaved African is downgraded. Firmin also glorifies and takes pride in the westernization of Toussaint Louverture: He had inculcated in them family mores through marriage which he imposed everywhere and which was protected by articles 9, 10, and 11 in the 1801 Constitution. He imposed upon fathers and mothers

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66  Georges Eddy Lucien the duty of raising their children within the Christian religion and in the fear of God (article 5 from the ordinance of October 12, 1801). In this same ordinance, completed and advanced by several others, the police were organized in order to curb vagabondage, to stop long-​held superstitious practices and to make working obligatory, all while protecting good citizens against prejudice.20 In this way, Firmin does not examine the power that language, religion, or ethnicity exert and for which they are vehicles.21 Language, and more generally, culture, are instruments of domination: of the metropolitan place over the colonial one, of a colonial port over the space of the plantation, of metropolitan maritime cities over colonial cities, of one class over another. This is, as Claude Raffestin writes, “all a question of knowledge—​of its elaboration, its appropriation, its accumulation and its transmission; this makes information something else; a resource and a mode production, an instrument of power.”22 As he continues, Religion is a collection of values that deals in dissymmetry, much like language; language is also Church and in this sense, power, inseparable from the State in terms of the exercise of social reproduction. One legitimizes the other, bringing about this consensus that facilitates—​extraordinarily—​the reproduction and the management of power.23 This process illuminates how a colonized place is constructed with regard to the situation of the colonizer, along with its habits and customs. However, this westernized place of colonial accommodation slowly became undone. The colonized place is, in fact, cut up into rebellious parcels of territory. Colonized space is inscribed within a dynamic that signals a rupture from its Western referent. The era of 1804 seems like the most complete translation of this process, shifting from a dependent space to a rebellious place. Once liberated, the space becomes strangely relativized. As Firmin sees it, Haiti is the child of the French Revolution, its point of reference. It was, as Firmin concludes, “a formal condemnation of slavery and all the inequalities instituted by the guidelines of the Code Noir and bolstered by colonial ordinances at the same time as the age-​old traditions of the motherland, classifying the French as nobles and commoners.”24 Firmin’s conclusion, though, does not seem to hold up. The antislavery politics of French revolutionaries is actually a contestation of a certain mode of exploitation inherent to the colonies and does not automatically mean anticolonialism in principle. What is more, in the colonies, slavery has always gone hand in hand because it is their principle source of profit.25

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  67 Saint-​Domingue allowed for the rise in power of the French bourgeois maritime classes. This group accumulated massive wealth over the course of three centuries. This class held economic power and, in the interest of accumulating more, was invested in eliminating the constraints imposed by the Ancien Régime in an effort to diminish production costs and to reinvest the largest portion of profit.26 Banality dues, tolls, the Colombier and Garenne monopolies, various royalties, all of these advantages, all of these disadvantages, and, of course, tax inequality, were all constitutive factors in stifling the growth of the bourgeoisie.27 These constraints were despised by the bourgeoisie, and the revolution was nothing more than a challenge to the old order of things and the installment of a new political order that would dynamize the ascending bourgeois class. Just like the slave trade, slavery itself was the economic basis for the French Revolution. Arguably, the Haitian Revolution is not the child of the French Revolution! The development of French maritime cities, the theater of revolutionary actions, and the increasing wealth of the French bourgeoisie were fueled by the pillage taking place in the colony, through the outrageous exploitation of the Indigenous and the enslaved. In this sense, the colonized place is nothing but an extension of the French metropole in the Americas. The colonized place also presents a spatial duality: on one hand, a rather dynamic territory, the coastline, and on the other, a more static territory, the interior. From this perspective, the plantation economy developed in the territory requires commercial ports and does not need a dense and hierarchical urban landscape like in the metropole.28 This unequal urban landscape corresponds to the royalist desire to create a buffer and an organized exploitation of the colonial space. It is equally as profitable as the interior space but remains subordinate to the maritime city. The urban landscape bustles thanks to slavery, endeavors to rid itself of the Ancient Régime, not so much out of revolutionary motivations as out of a necessity to break the constraints of accumulation and of profit.29 The colonization of Saint-​Domingue therefore promoted an excessive increase in capital for the French maritime bourgeoisie. At the same time, colonization sounded the death knell for Haiti’s development. Capitalism fabricates a territorial imbalance that translates into a significant difference between the metropolitan place, energized and strengthened through colonial production, and the colonized place, which, due to colonial processes of extraction and appropriation, is exhausted and decapitalized. This process can be represented in the functioning of a hydroelectric dam. The differential releases energy that the referent, or metropolitan place, captures fully. In return, the development of the colonized space occurs without regard for the well-​being of human life and natural resources. This leads to the vulnerability and decapitalization of the colonized place.30

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68  Georges Eddy Lucien The space that comes into view simultaneously reflects the practice of domination and resistance inherent in these differences, which are both obstacles to the exercise of complete power. Moreover, the existing resources do not predate the Indigenous.31 They created their own property, variably and over time, based on the value of utility and exchange they attributed to it.32 The metropole also seeks to impress upon these resources new notions of property value. This is not a zero-​sum game. Nevertheless, the metropole, possessor of technology, is better situated than Indigenous populations, possessors of raw materials, and enslaved Black populations. The metropole seems to base its fearsome power upon a mastery of technology and of circulation (England, mistress of the seas) more so than upon production.33 The important question: should communication and technology be considered resources? There are indeed formidable issues of power that Firmin is not unaware of. Firmin highlights the geographic culture generated by Christopher Colombus. Columbus was a master cartographer, a discipline that grants authority to exploration, and facilitates strategic reasoning derived from the collection of knowledge by royalty long before the sixteenth century. In this context, cartography reveals itself to be an instrument of power and a source of power itself. As Firmin underscores, along with the strategic mobilization of cartography, representations born from the Western imaginary are marked on the inside, by the fable of the civilized, while the outside is marked by the myth of the savage “They (Westerners) think,” he underscores, “that our current state (Haiti) is the result of a sort of indefinable physiological fatality, known as racial inferiority.”34 Moreover, these geographical and imaginary frames of knowledge are tools of symbolic oppression and social control within a colonial context. Geographers essentially profit from their knowledge through the project of colonization, by serving as experts in the field. Their analytical tool offers an illustration of this fact. Environmental determinism is applied in retrospect to legitimate European domination. These geographic representations carry an empirical meaning, the exploration and the description of uncharted land, and a theoretical aspect, the geometric and astrological conception of the globe that correspond to two different modes of cartography: on the one hand, maps and sketches rooted in geometry, and graphically rendered itineraries of voyages on the other.35 This implies the intersection between Politics and Geography, which takes place on two distinct levels:

• on a conceptual plane, Geography is enlisted in the service of imperial domination

• on a pragmatic plane, dominant modes of reasoned management from the Empire are established

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  69 In its goals and intentions as well as its modes of appropriation and development, the English empire is essentially founded on geographical knowledge. This knowledge ranges from locations and cartographic representations to defined subgroups of territories and colonial societies. Thus, the Empire is, in essence, a “geographic project”36 and, at the same time, as David Livingstone puts it, geography is its aide-​de-​camp.37

The Demarcation of Space by the Other Firmin also offers an interpretation of space as a symbol and rhetorical figure of territory. In his writing, he refers to numerous objects, signs, and constructions inscribed in space. It is the symbolic marking of space that is destined to convey the idea of appropriation.38 The process of colonization in North America presents multiple forms of marking space, from toponymy and demarcation to the division of territory and architectural production. In May 1607, the English founded the city of Jamestown. As Firmin describes it, the chosen site featured a favorable geographic location and was highly symbolic. “The country was explored and, a month later, a colony was established on the left bank of the river, with the founding of the city named Jamestown, in the honor of James I, who appointed Edward Winfield as governor.”39 Effectively, the newly created city benefited from a privileged geographic location. This site had several elements to its credit. First, it was endowed with a water depth that allowed for the construction of quays and piers necessary for the functioning of the colony. In this way, this territorial marking involves material action through the installation of various structures (port, administrative, and religious) and the establishment of significant, long-​lasting landmarks. Additionally, the city of Jamestown is, above all, a political act of control and ascendency. Its territorial representation is guided by Greek logic. In this context, for the English and more generally the colonial settlers, place seems to be a way to mark their territory in accordance with their habits, customs, and their modes of appropriating space. The system of scouting put in place by the metropole accentuated Western religious beliefs. In 1512, Ponce de Léon “discovered” the great American peninsula that he named Florida, to honor the day of his landing, which was on Palm Sunday, or Pascua Florida. In 1515, Juan de Salus took an expedition along the American coastline and “discovered,” on January 1 1516, a river he named Rio de Janiero, to honor the day of his voyage.40 Likewise, “the name of the Hudson river was granted by Henry Hudson, ‘in commemoration of his precious discovery.’ ”41 Furthermore, the names given to places are occasionally suggested based on a given resemblance. Firmin recalls no other such case than that of New Spain.

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70  Georges Eddy Lucien What is more, the system of scouting is the staging of the self in space. “The first establishment in the State of Massachusetts was granted the name of Plymouth, in commemoration of the English city from which its founders departed to travel to America.”42 It renders visible the nobles of the kingdom and monarchical institutions. In fact, the Western portion of the United States was granted the name of Caroline, in honor of Charles IX (of France), by the French who founded a settlement there one century prior; its former name was preserved by the American concessionaires, but in honor of Charles II of England.43 Similarly, Robert Calier, for example, gave the name Louisiana to the land that extended beyond the right bank of the (Mississippi) River, in honor of Louis XIV. In addition, the naming of places displays the imprint of metropoles; it is how they mark their territory. “All of Latin America found itself under the domination of Spain, which implanted there its language and mores.”44 Relatedly, in order to establish itself, the metropole seeks to eliminate differences, Indigenous cultures. Across space and time, the metropole establishes a field of actions that allow it to extend itself. The metropole installs itself in a place that benefits, generally, from a favorable geographic position. The metropole then combines, centralizes, concentrates, homogenizes, disintegrates, and crushes. The colonization of Connecticut is an example of this, as Firmin underscores: The colonies of Connecticut developed rapidly due to the excellent quality of the soil and the pleasant climate, which attracted many colonial migrants. They were, however, bothered by the hostility of the Indians, particularly by the Pequot tribe. Thus, the settlers were obligated to destroy the tribe in order to feel completely at peace.45 In this way, within the metropole’s politics of unification there is a willingness to erase differences, the cultures of Indigenous peoples. The assumption of power over the naming of places by metropoles can be considered a supplementary manifestation of absolute power.46 Colonial powers claim a monopoly on naming rights just as they do with other monopolies (territorial, commercial, physical and social infrastructures, and so on).47 The place names carry with them a certain amount of symbolism and value. They bear the names of the founders, names of European places, of remarkable members of royalty. The exemplary nature of these figures is placed before the eyes of everyone. Social groups, social classes, and certain institutions also associate themselves with space. So, through the vector of a transmitted image of a place, these groups promote the values and symbols of the dominant classes in the colonies and in their metropoles. In this sense, the colonized place

17

Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  71 is built into a much larger system, surpassing the frame of a delimited space. The linkages are local and international. Local when it comes to the relationships between the colonial littoral and the plantations, and supranational when it comes to transmitting colonial products to the metropole. These exchanges bring various places together: the plantation, the site of production; the colonial space, transmitting colonial products toward the metropole, which, in turn, feeds into the national product and the force of labor of the enslaved.

Place, the Product of Evasion, Agreement, and Conflict Furthermore, place is constructed through a willingness to flee, to erase differences or sites of resistance that are attached to these differences. Jamestown is an example of this. Its location is far from the Indigenous tribes established in Virginia. The choice of location for Jamestown could be considered as a reaction of avoidance with regard to the presence of Indigenous populations and their modes of organization. At the same time, place, in question for the settlers, is a way to illustrate the advancement of their development. The site and island where Jamestown was established was considered by Indigenous tribes to be too poor and too remote for agriculture. In addition, the land is swampy and thus prone to mosquitoes. In this context, the construction of place seems to be the product of avoidance and of resistance—​battles between settlers and their metropole. Firmin is eloquently aware of this. Place is constructed through cooperation, resistance, and rivalries. Sometimes this results in a dynamic of co-​optation, as Firmin underlines. Observably, space is an apparatus that places various modes of management into conflict. It is the fruit of collaborations between the colonials (local) and the metropole (global). It also places the actions of one category (the colonials) into an organizational role with respect to its own territory (the colony), and the colonized space establishes protocols for the independent management to guard against metropolitan domination more effectively. Indeed, as Firmin underscores: In 1639, they (the settlers of Connecticut) adopted a constitution establishing a civil government in the colony. This constitution was more durable than any other formed by other colonies. This constitution put a governor in place for colonial administration, established a legislature and magistrates of the same character as those serving in an English county or province, where magistrates were elected by way of an annual ballot. All habitants who pledged allegiance to the state benefited from the right of suffrage.48 In the end, the names of these places display their imprint and boldly mark the colonies and their contemporary trajectory. One of the places

27

72  Georges Eddy Lucien where the trace of time is most legible is in the historic center. In this case, Firmin conveys information related to time and to space. The namings of these places are indirect indicators of various moments in their trajectory. Moreover, Firmin demonstrates the importance of the ideological work performed to legitimize the metropole in the very production of place. He shows the mechanisms put in place by the metropole to perpetuate and legitimize the appropriation of space. These places, as Firmin notes, are first instituted in the names of individual territorial entities and are then named after collective groups. English colonization is the result of intensely individualist initiatives.49 Firmin’s assertion speaks for itself: It is the localist spirit that dominated within each of the colonies. Indeed, although all were, more or less, of England; although all spoke English and had, generally speaking, Anglo-​Saxon blood in their veins, these colonies developed parallel to one another, without formally developing recognition of one another along the lines of moral and political solidarity.50 Firmin continues in this way, in order to reveal the extent to which relations between the colonies were tense: What’s more, in attentively scrutinizing the details of their individual existence (if it has been permitting to express itself this way) we can even observe a certain antagonism between the colonies that is pushed, on occasion, to the point of antipathy.51 In this context, the hardly cordial relationships among colonies resulted in limitations to their economic development and, ultimately, their earning potential for the English state. Intercolonial exchange was almost nonexistent. Moreover, the relationship between the colonies and the metropole is one of power, where the metropole imposes its modalities. Everything by and for the metropole. Indeed, the particularities that make a colony indifferent to the needs of the others, operating under the egotistical and arbitrary legislation Great Britain, also makes the colony only capable of seeing the other colonies as a source of illegitimate, but sure, enjoyment.52 The colonized place is nothing but a royal province. It is “the beginning of a policy deliberately adopted by England and championed by the nation for more than a century with the goal of enriching its social classes by stripping the colonial settlers of the just rewards for their labor.”53 These settlers are considered in this context “by the motherland as inferior and subjugated beings that were placed in a few colonies established in remote regions for trade benefits.”54 Spatial relationships are forged through

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  73 difficult and complex processes. Between colonies, space is an autonomous territorial entity and the relationship is tense. Between the colonies and the metropole, the relationship is varied, imbalanced, and unequal. Then, it becomes conflictual between the colonies, the metropole, the Indigenous, and the colonial settlers. Nevertheless, sometimes the relationship is cultivated through collaboration, woven from the network of alliances in North America between the English and the Indigenous, the Cree in James Bay. In 1664, after the conquest of New York, the English metropole allied itself with the Iroquois, with whom nearly all of the colonies were allied.55 These networks of alliances placed the metropole in a favorable position to establish itself in Northeast America. Increasingly committed to the path of capitalism, increasingly turning to the sea, finally a country emerges that has significantly embraced both emigration and religious tolerance, ideas that led to the opening of the colonies to dissidents. Great Britain was highly successful in its colonial enterprises in North America, where the European population was twenty to thirty times more than that of the colonies.56 In this context, the place progressively takes on the name of the collective. According to Anténor Firmin, this attempt to consolidate is a construction that can be observed in many contexts and the stakes of which vary. First, it corresponds to “the need to set aside a common fear, such as the continuous threat of Indians they found incompatible, which could unify two or more colonies in their mission though a salutary action.”57 In these connections, Firmin saw the building blocks for the nation of the United States. First it was a matter of a defensive war, then an offensive war. A defensive war in the first instance, Firmin indicates since “the diverse colonials threw themselves in the face of danger together, and even before the feelings of camaraderie emerged, they felt as though they were brothers in arms.”58 This gesture was to account for the stakes of this cohesion or the alliances between the metropole and its colonies. In these conditions, place is constructed in the context of compromise. Struggles between places is not a zero-​sum game in the sense that the colony loses or the metropole wins; or rather, the struggles between places ends in success for one and defeat for the other. Instead there is a form of sharing or sets of compromises that emerge according to the means and strategies of one country or the other. As noted, “Great Britain had to soften its colonial policies in order to attract American troops (drawn from all of the colonies) to fight alongside English soldiers against the French in Canada.”59 Firmin also remarks that “In its American colonies, Great Britain found a way to extend English patriotism, enthusiastically invested in the glory and material growth of England.”60 This reveals that in a non-​zero-​sum situation, the stakes are shared.

47

74  Georges Eddy Lucien

Place, a Reflection of Social Relationships In this context, place (the colony) involves a juxtaposition of diverse logics that, in turn, characterize its principle modes of organization and management. Place is thus the result of spatial entanglement (local and global). Differences, relativity, discrimination, and justifications for inequality mingle here. The primary concern for geographers is thus the fact that power denies disparity and seeks conformity. In its transfer of place and in its mode of appropriating space, the metropole negates the other—​Indigenous peoples—​and, to a lesser degree, the colonial settlers. What is more, in the colony a social and spatial segregation occurs. “The wealthy class,” Firmin emphasizes, “benefited from instruction that the masses had no means of accessing in the absence of any public school in the colony.”61 Sir William Berkeley’s declaration provides a probing account of this issue. So, he states: Everyone instructs their children in accordance with their means (…). I thank God that we neither have public schools, nor the press, and I hope that such will be the case for another century; because instruction has brought disobedience, heresy, and a sectarian spirit into the world, and the press has levied demands of this nature against the finest government. May the Lord keep us in his custody.62 In this place, education is a discriminatory marker. The acquisition of education is connected to one’s place within the economic system of slavery. This system selects, aggregates, conglomerates, and disaggregates. It discriminates and divides society into classes. Place is nothing more than a reflection of this. Place is not homogeneous. This is because territorial divergence appears to be inherent to the production of slavery’s system of relations, guaranteeing the maximization of profit. On one hand you have Indigenous populations, enslaved peoples, and poor whites whose labor was unpaid or underpaid; and on the other you have metropolitan administrators, and merchants or settlers—​the holders of intellectual and cultural capital, the maintainers of order, and the beneficiaries of colonization. The network of places that is thus conceptualized to allow for an organized exploitation of the colony paints a picture in which the places themselves (colonies and metropoles) are even closer to one another than their own hinterland. This conceptualization does not constitute, however, a balanced framework of place. The ports of the metropoles feed off of the production and the labor force of the enslaved (Blacks) or the Indigenous without much compensation from colonial spaces. This exploitative relationship then creates all sorts of significant obstacles for accumulation. When it comes to the kind of economic development (and accumulation) that is prioritized within colonized spaces, this exploitative relationship creates all kinds of problems. Under these conditions, the

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  75 dynamism of metropolitan spaces is a corollary of the decapitalization of those in the colonies. The metropole profits while the colonies experience losses. At the core of both spaces are relationships of domination and of class stratification: the property owners, the businessmen, the administrative personnel becoming wealthy off the labor of the working class, the enslaved. The colony is therefore the reflection of social relationships. There, the homes of the wealthy can be distinguished from the homes of modest inhabitants or the enslaved. Under these circumstances, the representatives from the metropole, the property owners, and the businessmen present a social visibility within a spatial dimension. Additionally, place is cohabitation: social groups and social classes sometimes have divergent interests and opposing values. The construction of place depends upon a wide range of classes, categories, and diverse territorial entities. Place is built through the adoption of various forms according to the context. This stands to reason because, at times, the principle contradiction shifts. The principle contradiction becomes secondary in order to make way for tensions between the French and English metropoles. In this way, English colonial settlers, Indigenous peoples, and metropolitan personnel live together in support of the same cause. Moreover, the development of place occurs to the detriment of enslaved and Indigenous peoples as well as natural resources. This development leads to the exploitation of the natural resources of a place, bringing about its own fragility, vulnerability, and decapitalization. Metropolitan personnel, much like colonial settlers and merchants, view place outside of its ecosystem and its human conditions. They violate the limits of place and its capacity to build itself back up. The place thus loses is luster and appeal, due to the exploitation of resources beyond what its environment can withstand for economic gain.63 To cite David Harvey once again, this is called accumulation by dispossession.64 Among the links between places, there are some that lose their luster, while others shine brightly. The first of these are the useful spaces in terms of providing raw materials and agricultural products. They are placed on a scale of achievement. The others are the sites of reception and transformation of these raw materials. These are the spaces that give order, shall we say, to the decision-​making scale. This representation of a network of spaces corresponds to the image of a pyramid or a hierarchy. In this sense, it is hard to imagine this geography in any other way than through the neat cordoning off of useful spaces, dependent spaces, and decision-​making spaces. This is the image of little colonial cities that live in symbiosis with spaces of implantation and production, which are organized to flow into the main colonial cities that, in turn, monopolize on the relationships with the far-​off places (metropoles) according to the established decision-​making scale. The organization of places that appears here is designed socially and economically. Socially, because there are some places that are more symbolic than others. There are some places with a strong and obvious

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76  Georges Eddy Lucien symbolic charge. In many cases, the symbolic weight of these places is essential to their identification as places.65 The symbolism of a place comes from its aptitude to give and transmit meaning. In the quest for meaning-​giving and for the visibility of places, myths and allegories play an important role. Firmin evokes this in his discussion of the controversy around Christopher Colombus’s burial site. Firmin’s anecdote recalls the polemic around Homer’s ashes and his birth. This anecdote clearly signals the particular way in which places are personalized and emblematized. In fact, Columbus’s ashes “are the object of a very strange controversy. They claim that his ashes were first transported to the Monastery of Las Cuevas of Sevilla in 1513, and then later to Santo Domingo in 1536, where they remained for more than two centuries. But, in 1795, after the Treaty of Basel, which ceded to France the eastern part of the island of the two Santo Domingos, the ashes were sent to Cuba and buried in the Cathedral of Havana. However, Santo Domingo and Sevilla believe that the remains of the great Admiral lay in repose in their soil!66 Firmin knew how to play with geographic scales in order to reveal the weight of a symbol or its role in the production of the meaning of a place. Assigning an identity by attributing a symbol to it is not the prerogative of a place. This practice concerns territorial entities from several orders. As Firmin underscores: The whole of America appears jealous of having such a precious deposit. Washington would’ve been ready to dispute the honor of Havana and Santo Domingo […]. The ashes of the Discoverer of America had not yet found their final resting place, says M. Henry Davenport Northrop. This place is under the Dome of the Capital of the Republic, the existence of which he made possible.67 To summon Christopher Columbus, the Discoverer, corresponds to an image of a “highly exceptional” person in the way Firmin presents him. In this representation, the Discoverer and “conquest are presented as prodigious exploits achieved by a handful of courageous men, almost solely by their presence, in the name of God and the Kingdom of Castile, and who dominated thousands of primitive and savage peoples.”68 This is, in fact, the myth of modernity,69 where a person is defined as the sole discoverer and conqueror who effaces the Other, the Indigenous and their territorial practices. Christopher Colombus’s interjection on October 12, 1492, is very illuminating in this regard. He states: “They are as naked as the day they were born.”70 Here, the Discoverer cancels the meaning of place created by the Other. His ashes are not only signs meant to glorify him, they are summoned and instituted to mark a particular place and, at the same

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  77 time, to symbolically erase the traces of another place, that of Indigenous peoples. These peoples are, to cite Maurice Sixto, “the masters of the land, who paid dearly for this misadventure that we continue to call the discovery of America!”71 And, to further illustrate the degree to which the discovery was a tragedy for Indigenous people of America and of their places, Sixto adds: It was a cataclysm for the Indians, a bolt of lightning in a serene sky, to witness the landing of these adventurers with a cross in one hand and a rifle in the other to exterminate them all in the name of religion and civilization. Forced to work day and night in the mines, the Indians endured the most unimaginably horrible treatment. Christopher Columbus was the first to establish slavery on the island of Ayiti with the repartimientos. Queen Isabella dreamed of the spices of Asia, she sold her jewelry to finance this infamous expedition and with it prepared an immense tomb.72 The glorified, dominant place impresses upon a bare and battered place, an identity, a meaning that corresponds to its values, its territorial practices, its mercantilist instincts. This mutilated place is recomposed through westernization. The interjections of Maurice Sixto in J’ai vengé la race speak clearly to this point: We are forgotten, exotic. And we love paradoxes. Would you believe it, Mademoiselle, in front of the magnificent bay of our capital we still have a statue of the Genoese explorer. And what is he doing there? I’m sure he’s asking himself that same question. I don’t know whether it’s to perpetuate…. (?) Because when it happened this rude conquistador took off—​without invitation—​as the head of a gold-​thirsty band of mercenaries to torture Indians, massacre them and take their riches. I really don’t understand what he’s doing here. Do we want to prove that the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime? I didn’t see a statue of the Duke in Addis Ababa, or even a statue of the Führer at the airport in Tel Aviv. Kafka died way too soon. He really missed out on a topic for a good book.73 The Indigenous person, without a past or a history thus cannot have their own logic of spatial appropriation, as Firmin seems to present. The Indigenous place is virgin and naked and then it is then cloaked in the habits and customs of the metropole, decorated with the trappings of the West, as Maurice Sixto would say. In this sense, the New World is a place in which to counter the West. “In 1621, under the influence of the patriots of England, Virginia was definitively endowed with a written constitution, granting the colony a

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78  Georges Eddy Lucien governmental organization resembling in every way that of the metropole.”74 In this, Firmin saw the emergent construction of the United States. The first moments of the United States date back to this period. Its sites as well as its configurations seem linked to English modes of appropriation. In this context, Firmin abstractly imagines an apriority that does not take into account the heritage of the Indigenous in the organization of space in perpetual reconstruction. He seems to forget the Indigenous of North America by only privileging the rationality of English exploitation. This is also the genesis of Haitian Indigenism that does not pay any heed to the Indigenous, and, as a result, minimizes the import of their heritage (architecture, land use, food cultures, and so on). All the ambiguity of the Haitian elites is there: the elite call for a return to African roots, but their referent is the West. The glorified African or peasant past slips into the background. They also call themselves Dessalinian, but they remain, to this day, indifferent to the meaning of the Indigenous name given by Dessalines to the rebellious and free place called Ayiti with the dawning of independence in 1804. Nothing is mentioned about the Indigenous name. The question overflows with meaning: what did Ayiti mean to Dessalines? The Indigenous were the first to rebel and generated the first forms of resistance against invaders. Certain warriors, such as Caonabo, Anacaona, Hatuels, Henry, Tamayo, were active and consistent in their resistance against the Spanish. They fought head-​on in the plains of Vega-​Real; however, overwhelmed by the power imbalance in army strength, they set about organizing their struggle elsewhere.75 In Cuba they took refuge in the interior of Kiskeya and built what would soon become the liberated place of Plateau Central. There, in infiltrating the labyrinthine mountain passes, they were able to access the main caverns of the region (Voute à Minguet, Saint Francisque, Bassin Zim, and so on). They sowed the seeds of places from which practical knowledge was then passed on to the first African maroons. These isolated refuges, necessary for retreat, were slowly transformed into a network of resistance by groups of maroons. They became radiant sites of emancipation. Haitian historiography, to this point, renders abstract the Indigenous period and their resistance. If it is irrefutable that the period of French colonialism is marked by moments of rarified intensity, we are no less obliged to explain, for example, many highly misunderstood aspects of Haitian history: the concrete occurrence of Indigenous and African maroons, the true foundation of the first and only victorious slave revolution in the world. The colonized place is truly a place of ambiguity between discourse and practice. It is the place in which cultures are hierarchized or, in the case of Indigenous communities, completely obliterated. Yet, places occupied by Indigenous peoples were carved out and appropriated in ways particular to them.

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  79

Toward the Renewal of Certain Analytical Categories By revisiting the history of a place, the United States (its constructions, practices, and appropriations), Firmin allows us to understand the complexity of colonial domination. Colonial domination unfolds in various ways. It moves from the enslavement of a place, the expression of technical mastery over this place, to the implantation of an imaginary geography aimed toward a reinvention of the place that bears witness to the encounter between the colonial settlers, the Indigenous, and the Africans. As noted, An event of a certain sociological significance took place in 1613; the marriage of Pochahontas, the daughter of an Indian cacique, with a young Englishman. It was the first legal union between a man of the white race and a woman of the red American race. This marriage bestowed feelings of goodwill from chief Powhatan and his tribe upon the Europeans; however, this act greatly displeased James I, who was unhappy with the presumption of one of his subjects to marry a princess.76 From this point of view, the focus on the trajectory of a place enables Firmin to favor a combination of analyses with diverse points of entry such as: the social, the environmental, the cultural, and the political. Through snapshots, Firmin considers colonial places as simple scenes in which colonial actions unfold, more precisely, as they relate to the colonization of North America. He summons their meanings, their discourses, without any apparent link between them. Yet their iconographic discourses, elements, and objects participate heavily in the process of colonization. They brand the colonized place with the mark of the colonizer. They have the capacity to organize the place in structures capable of making the colony function.77 This literature review illuminates how colonial mechanisms function through the framework of spatial knowledge. This approach makes possible the consideration of place as a discursive and material production, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It also takes into account the ways in which the colonized place is rendered intelligible to the English and the French. Naming practices and other linguistic gestures play a significant role. They are important as they formally stage a dialogue between the colonial settlers and the colonized place. The act of naming the hills, rivers, tributaries, and roads along with other speech acts is a way of providing an appropriated place with a textual presence—​of making it familiar to the English. At the same time, it is the idea of dispossession through the seizure of a place, essentially rendering the Indigenous strangers in their own land. Furthermore, the cordoning off of space brings with it a visible hierarchy

08

80  Georges Eddy Lucien on the spatial order.78 This conveys the desire of the Empire to render the appropriated space just as legible and intelligible as a book written according to its own Western logic and rationality.79 The structural elements (roads, villages, portuary equipment, and so on) or the banal aspects that are placed there correspond to this very logic. Forms of management are also brought to the fore. This manner of organization is supposed to progressively change the way that the Indigenous and the Africans order space and it weighs heavily on the way they appropriate space. Using the register of morality, Firmin instead proposes mutual respect between places. Additionally, he advocates for a geopolitical order grounded in the principle of place equality (the right to self-​definition and self-​ determination). His proposition is composed of two points of entry:

• a philosophical entry point, concerning the latitude to freely give meaning to one’s place.

• ​an international relations entry point, concerning the principle of the

right of people to freely choose the forms of government and organization of their place without fearing for the partial surrender of their sovereignty.

This twofold proposition anticipates the establishment of a more just world order, one that does come with, strangely, the partial abandonment of the sovereignty and power of place itself. Firmin also insists on the necessity of regrouping various parcels of places (The Antillean Confederation) as a way of curtailing the hegemonic aims of US Americans within the Caribbean. In Firmin’s text, geopolitics has various meanings. More generally, geopolitics explains the inner workings of power at play in a given place and at different levels (the colonized space; Saint-​Domingue or Haiti, Canada, the battle between France and England). Then geopolitics takes on a more practical meaning. In the name of determinism, geopolitics exonerates the aspirations and appetites of conquest, often without any nuance. This flows directly through Firmin since his mode of analysis is strongly influenced by positivism. He himself admits: “All of the good aspects we can find [in Firmin’s work], must be attributed to the excellence of the positivist method that I have attempted to apply to anthropology.”80 Place is understood particularly in his study as a collection of more or less organized buildings, production equipment, and artifacts. From this perspective, Firmin privileges points of reference or the bits of space that catch the eye. In this way, he limits himself most often to a physical-​ spatial approach, characteristic of positivist thought. His description of New York is a striking example of this method. Yet, another memory that comes to my mind—​ absolutely contemporary, so vibrant and so appropriate for the expression of

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  81 my thoughts. As we enter the magnificent bay of New York in the evening-​time, where the beauty of the beaches exists in the most magical of panoramas, we were overtaken by a feeling of utter admiration that words cannot fully translate. We were incapable of enduring the intensity of the aesthetic pleasure provoked by the splendor of nature, multiplied, and reproduced in every detail and, at the same time, it exudes an irresistible charm as a whole. We tried to close our eyes half-​way, to escape inside ourselves, but the sublime light strikes our eyelids, we looked around, dazzled, and Bartholdi’s colossal statue—​a cordial offering from France—​stands out against the dark background of the sky, holding her shining torch like an enormous star above the immense strait. It is Liberty enlightening the world.81 And so, nothing is said about the places occupied by the workers, who construct and make the city of New  York function. The space that is revealed belongs to an autonomous territorial unit of the rest of the city. Now, this unit is effectively a space of relation. People are situated within it according to the place they hold in the process of production of goods and services. There also exist places where workers, the unemployed, and those of the middle class live as well as places for those who control the means of production. These spaces contend with and encounter one another on a daily basis in places of work, of service. Their proximity within the city is not the whole story. Physical proximity does not signify social proximity! Because every space, to this point, reflects social relationships and domination. Elsewhere it is more of the same, as Mike Davis observes in the case of Africa. He writes, “vast segments of the agrarian population found themselves not only refused access to the city, but what is more, and this is very important, access to a full and complete urban citizenship.”82 And, to go even further, this shows how the system put in place by the European empires prevents access to the space in question, the African city. Additionally, Firmin mobilizes a collection of terms that refer to a system of actors and to parcels of particular places (Western hemisphere, Caribbean basin, Caribbean zone) as a way of better grappling with geopolitics: the sites of conflict (Haiti, the Caribbean, and the United States), and the appropriation of place according to customs. At the same time, Firmin highlights a host of actors who are implicated in the creation of places. These range from the various personalities that make up the cabinet of the Empire (Christopher Colombus, Elizabeth, Colbert, Jacques XII, Jacques I) to those operating at the local level (Juan de Salis, Jean de Grijalva, Jacques Cartier, Dessalines, Toussaint) within the colonized or rebellious state. The mentioning of these places and actors warrants accounting for the conflicts surrounding matters of international relations, the management of colonized space. As such, Firmin proposes for us a geography that

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82  Georges Eddy Lucien addresses power, domination, decision-​makers, agents, and strategies. It is necessary, however, to put things into perspective since the personalities mentioned are mostly important figures. The places indicated, too, are often useful spaces of empire-​building by the colonials. On the other hand, some of the other places mentioned are more discreet, even hidden. They are places like those occupied by Indigenous maroons. In addition, Firmin’s vision of geopolitical equality does not take into account power relationships, or, at best, mobilize an overly educational and moralizing register. If we are to believe Firmin, the place that desires sovereignty should understand its opposition. Haitians don’t know the Americans well enough. This neglect of history, of studying the life and institutions of great people with whom we have many points of contact—​material and moral—​generates a huge gap and even poses a danger. This gap must be averted or filled as soon as possible.83 The Western referential place, the United States, is synonymous with progress and prescribed as the only imaginable horizon for places transitioning from enslavement to freedom. In fact, Firmin’s vocabulary is rooted in two diametrically opposed sites and peoples. The terms are employed indistinguishably to designate the first inhabitants of the America: the Indigenous, savages; while in return, others are used to designate a much more civilized, and civilizing place or for acculturated people or for people who are capable of being westernized: discoverer, New World, Old World.

Conclusion All in all, Firmin’s geopolitics remain too limited in the sense that he does not discuss the geopolitics of spatial domination or that of capitalism. It is, in fact, the logic of the latter’s accumulation that forces him to engage contradictory spatial perspectives that undermine his argument. International relations, sites of conflict, or modes of conflict management between places are mainly manifestations of this. Moreover, in his work, Firmin leaves a trace of a singular imperial gaze that takes possession in a rational and unequivocal manner. He does not take into account the interferences brought by the Indigenous and the Africans, and he is more or less silent regarding the traces of resistance to the colonial project. He refers to place in a metaphorical sense and not as a central object in the understanding of colonialism. This posture does not allow him to interrogate the dispossession of colonial space through the intervention of spatial strategy. As a matter of fact, Firmin does not insist on organizational activities that produce parcels of differentiated space that in turn create agreement, avoidance, domination, and also spaces of resistance. The empire creates place through the dynamics of opposition and accommodation—​between those who control it and those who inhabit it. An equally important question

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  83 is to understand how to emphasize both encounter and representation. Encounter makes the reorientation of the gaze possible: the colonized place is no longer a medium that primarily serves the West; from this point of view it becomes possible to see spatial modes of appropriation used by Indigenous peoples and how these modes shifted as a result of the encounter. In this way, Indigenous peoples are not simply passive objects that are manipulated and fabricated by the Empire. They are also implicated and are actors within the creation of their own place. This also means offering sustained attention to their capacity to resist the control and the domination of the Other. Nevertheless, from a methodological standpoint, this perspective also comes with some challenges. Given the absence of Indigenous and African archival records, the question becomes, how does one avoid speaking in the place of the other? Or how does one understand place, which has, until now, been defined by Western thought and logic? This new perspective expands the question of place as it exists in relation to the everyday lives of wealth-​creators as well as within colonial history more broadly—​ settlers and various aspects of capitalist evolution. This perspective illuminates the history of Settlers and Indigenous peoples, which, up until this point, has not received much scholarly attention. This approach challenges certain received ideas and opens up a new way of thinking: the geography of difference. Indeed, the tendency toward uniformity leads to maximal entropy. And this goes without saying for the dominant classes. Because power denies the disparity, segregation, and fragmentation of place, and, at the same time, puts together a whole social, physical, political, and ideological device designed to give the impression of uniformity, homogeneity, and isotropy.

Notes 1 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti, 28. 2 Ibid., 28. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 30. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 77. 7 Ibid., 228. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 229. 10 Ibid., 40; emphasis in original. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 46. 13 Ibid., 47. 14 Ibid., 33. 15 Ibid., 228. 16 Ibid., 232. 17 Ibid., 234; emphasis in original.

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84  Georges Eddy Lucien 8 Ibid. 1 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 278. 21 Raffestin, Pour une géographie du pouvoir, xviii. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 253. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Lucien, Le Nord-​est d’Haïti, La perle d’un monde fini, 86. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 82. 30 Ibid. 31 Raffestin, Pour une géographie du pouvoir, vii. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Courdy, Présentation de l’inventaire du monde. Géographie, 111. 36 Blais, Coloniser l’espace : territoires, identités, spatialité, 146. 37 Ibid. 38 Badariotti, Les noms de rue en géographie, 285–​302. 39 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti, 34; emphasis in original. 40 Ibid., 16. 41 Ibid., 40. 42 Ibid., 17. 43 Badariott, Les noms de rue en géographie, 285–​302. 44 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti, 50. 45 Ibid., 61. 46 Ibid., 21. 47 Ibid., 54. 48 Ibid., 50. 49 Ibid., 61. 50 Ibid., 21. 51 Ibid., 54. 52 Badariotti, Les noms de rue en géographie, 285–​302. 53 Ibid., 41. 54 Ibid., 42. 55 Ibid., 54. 56 Ibid., 61. 57 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti, 70. 58 Ibid., 71. 59 Ibid., 70. 60 Ibid., 71. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 28. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 72. 66 Ibid., 73.

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Sense of Place in … Monsieur Roosevelt  85 7 Ibid. 6 68 Ibid., 74. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 75. 72 Ibid., 74. 73 Ibid.; emphasis in original 74 Lucien, Espaces périphériques et économie d’archipel, 18. 75 Ibid. 76 Badariotti, Les noms de rue en géographie, 285–​302. 77 Ibid., 13. 78 Ibid. 79 Dussel, L’occultation de l’autre, Paris, Les Éditions Ouvrières, 126. 80 Ibid., 26. 81 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti, 35. 82 Ibid., v. 83 Ibid.

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5  Forms of Firminism Understanding Joseph Anténor Firmin Celucien L. Joseph

Introduction Joseph Anténor Firmin was the most influential public intellectual in Haitian society in the nineteenth century. As an incisive and careful writer, Firmin wrote prolifically, including books, academic essays, political essays, and public opinions on the pressing issues facing the Haitian society—​political, cultural, international, economic, historical, racial, and so on—​and the world at large. In his writings, as a thinker and statesman, he sought to be relevant to his primary readers, the Haitian people, and the international community, about intellectual and geopolitical issues in modern times. Firmin wrote to guide and inform his people, as well as to call his readers to take appropriate actions to confront the human condition and to solve the perils that characterized their own experience and existence, and their nation and society. Most importantly, as a humanist and universalist, Firmin wrote to transform human nature, to orient his readers to a different and more promising political, economic, and social order, and to interrogate and ultimately demolish undemocratic and oppressive institutions and systems that caused disorder and disaccord in society and human relations. Yet in terms of his intellectual and political lineage, Joseph Anténor Firmin was influenced by three great traditions: Haitian liberalism—​ his political orientation and democratic option—​ and European positivism—​ his epistemological framework and philosophical worldview. Correspondingly, Joseph Anténor Firmin was a pioneer of the Afrocentric paradigm and approach to study human history and universal civilization.1 The Afrocentric tradition is intrinsic to Firmin’s epistemology and understanding of ancient history and the birth of Western civilization. In addition, I would do a great intellectual injustice to Firmin’s legacy should I  fail to mention his indebtedness to the Haitian/​Caribbean intellectual tradition that shaped considerably much of his own thinking or ideas. Joseph Anténor Firmin was a man who embodied multiple traditions and philosophical systems, concurrently. He was a Caribbeanist, an Afrocentric anthropologist, a historian of the ancient Egyptian pharaonic civilization, a passionate social democrat, a

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Forms of Firminism  87 philosopher of the positivist school, and a great Haitian statesman and public intellectual. Outside of his country of birth, Joseph Anténor Firmin is famously and primarily known as the author of the epoch-​ making book The Equality of the Human Races, published in 1885. Because of the erudition and analytical arguments and dialectical propositions of this historic text relating to the belief in the hierarchy of the races and the doctrine of white supremacy, Firmin is celebrated internationally as an anti-​Black racism intellectual, an Egyptologist, a Pan-​Africanist, an interdisciplinary thinker, a disciplinary transgressor (in the academic sense), and a man of science. Current studies on Firmin in North American and Western scholarship read Joseph Anténor Firmin from the two dominant points of view, what I call the race concept model scholarship and the Afrocentric epistemological paradigm scholarship. The former relates to critical race theory and racially based human beliefs and actions connecting to biology, culture, identity, history, ethnicity, and the world’s racial and ethnic groups. The latter gives primacy to an African-​based worldview and theory of knowledge in the process of studying ancient history, global history, and universal civilization and culture. Its attempt is not only to deconstruct human history based on the Western epistemological paradigm, but also to correct false historical narratives about the African people and African diaspora and to resituate continental Africa, especially Black Africa, at the center of human origin and civilization. Firmin did not stop writing about intellectual racism and racist ideas after the publication of his 1885 book, nor did he cease engaging in the cognitive process and intellectual reflections on geopolitical, economic, and international issues at this periodic moment. North American and Western studies on Firmin have constrained him to the historical trajectories and the epistemological territory of the race concept and the Afrocentric paradigm. In this chapter, I offer a complex view and broader perspective on Firmin, his life, thought, and his roles as a Haitian statesman. I also provide the politico-​historical and intellectual context for the emergence of Firminism in Haitian society and politics. First, I  am arguing that Joseph Anténor Firmin needs to be viewed and studied primarily within the trajectory of Haitian history and Haiti’s politico-​ intellectual tradition. Firmin was foremost a Haitian thinker who was exclusively educated in Haiti, and his first circles of influence (or concentric circles) are Haitian and Caribbean. Second, I am proposing to reread Firmin with a fresh lens and innovative intellectual imagination beyond the North American scholarship of race concept model and Afrocentric epistemological paradigm because the writings and ideas of Joseph Anténor Firmin are substantially complex, transdisciplinary, and intersectional, and often critically engage the Caribbean and Latin American historical and political landscape. They also assess the human condition and political affairs of his native land of Haiti. Finally, I would like to suggest that contemporary studies on Firmin should investigate

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88  Celucien L. Joseph his life, career, and ideas in their entirety, and not restrict the man to a particular vision of history—​a distinctive periodization and an exclusive theory of knowledge—​and to an ideological academic disciplinary confinement. Forms of Firminism critically engage various disciplines and fields of study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including, and not limited to, ancient African history (ancient Egyptian pharaonic civilization and culture), ancient and modern European history, political theory, geopolitical history, sociology, international relations, and economics. Forms of Firminism refer to certain specific theoretical concepts and a group of intellectual propositions that originated from the writings and ideas of Joseph Anténor Firmin, including Firmin’s socialism, democratism, universalism, political liberalism, humanism, inclusive fraternity, universal brotherhood, philosophical and scientific positivism, and the natural equality of the human races and essential equality of the nations. Firminism considers the ideas of Firmin as associated with nation-​building, governance, politics, race theory, religion, and so on. This chapter provides an overview of the life, work, and civic roles of Joseph Anténor Firmin. It locates the development of Firmin’s ideas and Firminism as a doctrine within the historical, political, and intellectual context of Haitian history and the Haitian society. In particular, it situates Firmin’s political vision and democratic ideals within Haiti’s Liberal Party and democratic socialism—​aimed toward social transformation, national reform, and political stability. The chapter also discusses Firmin’s civic roles as a statesman and minister of finances, economics, and foreign affairs. Overall, the chapter suggests viewing Joseph Anténor Firmin as a social democrat and an activist-​intellectual who defended the best interests of the Haitian people and whose relentless attempt was to foster national unity, social coherence, and political stability. Toward this goal, I highlight some major historical events in Firmin’s life and career; this is by no mean an attempt to read Firmin chronologically.

The Emergence and Promise of Firminism Joseph Anténor Firmin loved the Haitian people and labored tirelessly to improve their living conditions, which would contribute to a democratic life in Haiti, and the economic mobility and the moral formation of his compatriots. Firmin was foremost a public intellectual activist who did not divorce ideas and actions in his struggle for democracy and political integrity in the country’s political institutions and civil society. He was concerned with the social question without undermining the political realities that were shaping the Haitian experience and history. He was equally concerned about promoting national unity and integrity, and safeguarding Haiti’s sovereignty and independence. It should be noted that it was the politico-​economic vision and democratic values as well as his sense of a thick patriotic nationalism that drew both intellectuals and the masses, military generals and anti-​ military

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Forms of Firminism  89 activists to embrace Firminism as the most promising doctrine to reform the country’s institutions and political system. The democratic values and economic-​political plans of Joseph Anténor Firmin were many. They are linked to nation-​building and state formation. On the political level, Firmin promoted national sovereignty and autonomy, opposed militarism, and supported the restoration of national dignity and unity. He believed that strong political institutions would lead to strong governance and political stability. Firmin was unapologetic about Haiti’s national interests and future possibilities in the world. As a public intellectual, he understood the importance of uncensored free speech and libertarian freedom in the public sphere; Firmin was a man of law and of order who believed that elected officials as the rest of the country’s population should respect the country’s laws and the constitution. Firmin maintained that the Haitian state and its institutions and administrative organization should impose a structural force within the country that promotes human dignity and mutual respect. He stated that military strength should be replaced by economic and moral development.2 On the social level, Firmin believed in strengthening Haiti’s social institutions, and in maintaining a constructive social order and harmony, and human solidarity between Haitians regardless of their color, political affiliation, educational status, or economic standing. As a social democrat, Firmin was a champion of public education and believed that it was the moral responsibility of the Haitian state to educate all people. For him, public education was an obligation for all Haitians. He upheld that democracy was not a theoretical idea, but a set of transformative practices and human behavior that contributes to the common good and human flourishing in society and in the world. Democracy is a transcendent force in society and politics that leads to the most promising political system and institutions in a republic or nation-​state. It transforms people, the political life, social relations, human interplay, and the system of governance. On the economic level, Firmin promoted national production (especially in agriculture) and the development of national goods and industries. He championed a free but regulated national market open to foreign investors and limited the overwhelming importation of foreign goods in Haiti. As minister of finances in various governments, he restricted the unnecessary spending of the government and balanced the country’s annual budget and expenditure.3 For Firmin, federally approved strict restrictions on customs, foreign trade, and real estate investment hindered Haiti’s economic development and progress in modernity; these also created international barriers and alienation between Haiti and other nations and postponed the bond of international friendship between Haitian citizens and the citizens of other countries. Consequently, not only did Firmin fight valiantly against corruption and smuggling in the government, but he also energetically interrogated foreign countries that attempted to restrict Haiti’s political freedom and isolate the country’s diplomatic relations with other

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90  Celucien L. Joseph countries. Firmin’s democratic virtues and adequate political qualities are grounded in his philosophy of human dignity, positive universalism, and his radical humanitarian ethic. These coveted positive human qualities, as observed in the life and writings of Joseph Anténor Firmin, were not natural or instantaneous; rather, Firmin developed them over many years of trial and error, through personal experience and improvisation, and intellectual evolution and political maturity. While Firminism owes some of its attributes to the political liberalism and economic theory of Edmond Paul and Boyer Bazelais, as an ideology and political practice, Firminism became more manifest in the Haitian society when President Nord Alexis was raised to power and Firmin and the Firminists opposed his candidacy and eventual despotism. Under the strong democratic leadership of their master, the Firminists were determined to reform the country’s institutions and systems to make them more democratic and politically effective. The Firmnists also blamed the Haitian state for ignoring the needs of poor Haitians and those living in the margins of Haitian society. In Histoire du peuple d’Haiti, Haitian historian and thinker Dantes Bellegarde defines Firminism as a movement and a set of ideas widespread in the writings of Firmin or applied by him when he was part of the government; they offered aspirations for a thick Haitian patriotism and assisted Haitian youths and the Haitian people in developing a critical consciousness about their social condition and political environment, as well as about their social well-​being, and empowered them toward progress and social well-​being, which coalesced in a program of domestic and foreign policy.4 Bellegarde explains that for the young Haitian people of 1900, Firminism was not a “party” in the sense of its association with a political party in the Haitian political terminology: What is called a “party” in Haiti is “an association of interests around a known name”; it is a group of individuals around a man who is pushed to the presidency: some, in small numbers, because they believe him capable of accomplishing some good for the country; the others, much more numerous, because they expect money and dignity from him. Each government thus arrives with its people, which it places in the most lucrative situations, and most often without any consideration of merit, competence, or morality. It is the “spoils system” put into practice in the United States by President Andrew Jackson, and that which engendered so much abuse that it had to be corrected by the institution of “civil service,” which made it possible to free the political influences from them, essential functions of national life.5 What then drew Haitian youths to Firminism? Bellegarde emphasizes the moral character attributes and ethical convictions and values of Anténor Firmin. Bellegarde, as a Firminist, articulates his own philosophy of

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Forms of Firminism  91 Firminism as a way of thinking democratically about the process of reconstructing Haitian society and the political system—​in a positive light.6 Next, he elaborates on the political aspect of Firminism and the imperative for the Haitian people to live in peace, harmony, and unity; he also connects Firminism with Firmin’s democratic ideals and socialist project to improve the living conditions of the Haitian people: For Firminism, it no longer seemed possible that the Haitian nation, without risking losing its independence, continued to live in agitation and anguish. The people needed peace—​real peace. The peasants demanded security in the countryside, the protection of their work and the assistance of the State in the organization of their means of production and consumption. The workers in the towns demanded fair remuneration for their services, without being forced to enroll in the shock brigades of revolutionary demagogues. Manufacturers and traders demanded fiscal security and the necessary support from credit institutions. The employees and civil servants demanded peace of mind to devote themselves to their work, under the sole guarantees of morality, professional competence and obedience to administrative regulations. The citizens demanded peace and justice through the exercise of the rights which the Constitution recognizes them. And what the whole nation demanded was the rule of law in freedom and the honest management of public affairs so that the people were no longer tormented by the morbid desire to change rulers and constitutions all the time—​which made the Haitians considered as children of seven years, or, worse still, as sick with infantilism or mental confusion. This is what Firminism was in the eyes of the young people of the 1900 generation.7 Moreover, Leslie Péan called Firminism a religion (“Le firminisme est une religion”)8 in the Haitian society. I  suggest that Firminism should be construed as an event and democratic intervention in Haitian history, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Another Firmin scholar, Marc Péan, interprets Firminism as a body of coherent doctrines that have both political, economic, and social content; in other words, Firminism is defined as political and social ideas linked to the political party called the Parti Liberal (Liberal Party).9 The realization of Firminism as a doctrine, according to Haitian historian and Firmin scholar Leslie F.  Manigat, occurred when the Haitian intellectual (Firmin) realized the symbiosis between thought and action, the indissoluble solidarity of which constituted Firminism. On the other hand, for Manigat, Firminism as an ideology or doctrine did not develop into a coherent body of work enough to offer a social model capable of making it possible to shape a model society in Haiti.10 He adds further that Firminism seemed more of an enthusiasm that left its traces as “memories of an epic” in Haitian society; as a result, it should be studied both as a doctrine and political

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92  Celucien L. Joseph practices.11 Other writers have defined Firminism with these specific qualifications: Firminism is first synonymous with humanism, patriotism, Antillanism, Pan-​ Africanism, internationalism, then honesty and probity in the management of State affairs. Broadly speaking, Firminism is Humanism, to parody the late President-​Academician, Leopold Sedar Senghor.12 While Manigat’s interpretation of Firminism is partially true, I believe that the political and economic vision of Firmin, based democratic governance and a liberal ideology, offers the greatest possibility and promise for constructing an effective nation, political state, and civil society in Haiti.

Firmin in the Haitian Context: Haitian History and Haitian Politics The author of the influential work The Equality of the Human Races (1885), Joseph Anténor Firmin, was born on November 27, 1850, in the historic city of Cap-​Haïtien, the second-​largest city in Haiti. The new Republic of Haiti was only 46  years old and had already established both a literary and an intellectual tradition, as well as a complex political system, including the Haitian monarchy. Firmin was only nine years old when Geffrard overthrew Soulouque from power. He was born only eight years after the earthquake of 1842 that devastated the city of Cap-​Haïtien, and after “the echoes and resonances of the 1843 revolution in the South and West” regions of the country.13 The year before his birth, the new Caribbean nation had just inaugurated its second Emperor. Emperor Faustin-​Élie Soulouque assumed the monarchical title “Emperor of Hayti,” or simply “Faustin I.” Emperor Soulouque reigned from 1849 to 1859. However, the founder of the Haitian nation, Jean-​ Jacques Dessalines, initiated the country’s first monarchy, being crowned the first emperor of Haiti as Jacques I (1804–​1806). Hence, Haiti’s first imperial constitution was promulgated in 1805 by Emperor Jacques I. It was also the country’s first postcolonial constitution after declaring its independence and sovereignty from France. It is good to remark here that both Dessalines and Soulouque were former slaves under the French colonial system and valiant military men and heroes who had fought in the Haitian Revolutionary war, leading to the independence and founding of the Republic of Haiti. Jean Casimir correlates both the Haitian Revolution and the birth of Haiti by asserting, “The making of the Haitian nation cannot be distinguished from the Haitian Revolution. They produced each other reciprocally.”14 In his general assessment of the Haitian governments, Anténor Firmin was very critical of the administration and leadership of both Emperor Dessalines

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Forms of Firminism  93 and Emperor Soulouque. Haiti’s first president and first emperor were military men. First, Firmin recognizes the enormous contributions of both politicians to the independence and political freedom of Haiti, which affirmed the dignity, equality, and humanity of the African people in Haiti: Indeed, the danger of national independence obtained by war -​and unfortunately there is only this one way to obtain it with dignity—​is that the heroes of this war necessarily become, after the triumph, the effective representatives of power, having in their hands military force, an instrument of coercion as well as of defense.15 Firmin is critical of Haiti’s first national government and emperor. He argues that the country was founded on political despotism when Jean-​ Jacques Dessalines, who was conferred with the title gouverneur à vie (governor for life), then became an emperor who assumed an autocratic and excessive power, even for the administration of the country’s military camp.16 Firmin highlights a major historical error in the country’s Declaration of Independence in reference to the country’s first postcolonial chief of state, which reads: We swear to blindly obey the laws emanating from his authority, the only one we recognize. We give him the right to make peace and war, and to appoint his successor.17 The problem with this declaration is twofold. First, the willingness of the people to submit to the chief of state, that is, Emperor Dessalines, contradicts the principles of a democratic government or state. This political declaration binds the will of the people with the will of Jacques in the most despotic manner. Second, it allows Emperor Dessalines to name his successor, another violation of the idea of a democratic government by the people and to represent the general will and desires of the people. Specifically, Firmin makes the following observation: The absolute power, granted to all others, could perhaps be explained by the feeling of the high intellectual and moral superiority recognized in that one; but granted Dessalines. It was the condemnation of the Haitian people to national slaughter.18 Despite his criticism, Firmin acknowledges Dessalines’s heroism and undivided commitment to Haitian freedom and political determination: The illustrious hero, who led the phalanges of ancient slavery to victory in a sublime gesture, will never be praised enough by history or revered enough by the memory of Haitians of all generations.19

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94  Celucien L. Joseph He goes on to praise Dessalines’s military genius, bravery, and describes in alarming language the uncompromising personality of Haiti’s founding father: However, on the battlefields, his unsurpassed bravery had been displayed in weapons worthy of glorifying a great captain; his torturing rigidity was a virtue opportune for the circumstances in which it developed, rendered crime for crime, contempt for contempt, in front of a Rochambeau or a General Salm who never ceases to shed the blood of blacks. The terrible qualities asked to be replaced by other aptitudes, for the government of a people. However, Dessalines had no other gift than his generous bravery and his brutality tempered, it is true, by real patriotism.20 After extolling Dessalines’s unfailing patriotism, and national security and sovereignty, Firmin characterizes Dessalines’s early governance as chaotic, anarchic, and that the emperor of Haiti had no conception of political order, leading to social disharmony and political disorganization.21 Elsewhere, in The Equality of the Human Races, Firmin compares the practice of despotism in Haiti’s political history to mental slavery: “For despotism is nothing but moral slavery; it allows one’s hands and feet to move freely, but it chains and muzzles the human soul by repressing thought.”22 A despotic state limits the freedom of expression and thought of the Haitian people, as well as the ability of the country’s citizens to live peacefully and act democratically. Firmin as a champion of democratic values and human freedom explains that it is important for the human will to be “free, enlightened, and unconstrained by tyranny.”23 What did Dessalines do about this disorder? Firmin elaborates that Dessalines was able to diagnose these early shortcomings in his administration and rise to create an orderly government and lawful society. However, Dessalines managed, by grace of state, to open his eyes to the scope of these disorders. He ended up scandalized by the concussions, the plundering of state property and other daring peculiarities. In his simplicity of mind, he lashed out in threatening words against those whose collaborators he had.24 In his trenchant critique of Dessalines’s early government, Firmin infers that Dessalines’s politics did not contribute to a democratic life in Haiti nor did the emperor himself know how to lead the country politically and how to unite the first Black nation in the Western hemisphere.25 Elsewhere, in reference to Dessalines’s disposition to create a new, independent, and free nation among existing slave societies in the Western world, Firmin reports that “The whole world scoffed at the idea that Jean-​Jacques Dessalines and his comrades would want to create their own country and

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Forms of Firminism  95 to rule themselves free of foreign control.”26 Here, Firmin is establishing the connection between (Black) heroism and (Black) independence and (Black) sovereignty. My early reference to Casimir’s comment on the meaning and implications of sovereignty in the context of the political nation of Haiti and its rapport to the colonial system is relevant at this point in this discussion: National sovereignty springs from empowerment-​ oriented knowledge and not from learning colonial regulations. The sovereignty of a state does not fall on it like manna from heaven. It is experienced by its citizen in their daily lives as an internal sovereignty, and hence it translates into political institutions equipped to establish, to negotiate, and to defend its external sovereignty.27 While Firmin is harsh and critical in his assessment of Dessalines’s government in its early phase, he also exalts the heroism and significance of Haiti’s founding father in the most majestic and felicitous words. He calls Dessalines “an impressive figure [who] shines high in our historical firmament.”28 While Firmin acknowledges Dessalines’s illiterate incompetence, he avows that “this man was endowed with a limitless energy and a military talent which even his most adamant adversaries have never questioned.”29 He goes on to exalt Dessalines’s courage and determination in the midst of the danger of white supremacy and the threat of death and the reality of dying, for the “glorious mission of leading the revolutionary movement which gave birth to Haitian independence.”30 It is because of his commitment to justice and the independence and political freedom of the Haitian people that Firmin could substantiate that Dessalines carried out his mission with admirable tact, always deserving of the trust of his people. He was truly the man for the situation. Where others would have softened and shown an ill-​advised sentimentality, he remained inflexible before an enemy who was oblivious to the humanity of the African legions, giving them tit for that, outrage for outrage.31 Firmin argues against the critics who often portray Dessalines as brutal and ferocious, and he states that to do so is “to show partiality which falsifies the voice of history and soils its majesty.”32 In other words, to condemn Dessalines for defending the freedom and independence of the Haitian people against the white oppressors and slave traffickers and masters is to humanize white supremacists and white oppressors; it is also to undermine the significance of Black dignity and Black equality. In fact, such criticism of Dessalines is an assault on Black justice and Black subjectivity. Firmin goes on to rightly defend Dessalines’s excessive ferocity because “he simply retaliated against the atrocious crimes of his adversaries.”33 The significance of Jean-​Jacques Dessalines in Haiti’s national history and

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96  Celucien L. Joseph memory is his relentless commitment to “the sentiment of racial equality, a sentiment of which Dessalines remains the symbolic embodiment of Haiti.”34 Consequently, in a memorable paragraph of praise and exaltation, Firmin signified further the surpassing symbolic representation, leadership, and meaning of Dessalines in the unfolding events leading to the Haitian Revolution, the birth of the nation of Haiti, and Dessalines’s unrelenting commitment in maintaining the liberty and sovereignty of the Haitian state and the Haitian people: We must honor the memory of this man of iron who joined to a peerless bravery the temperament of the dispenser of justice and the heroism of the liberator. In the patriotic cult of Haitians, who like all other nations worship the great men who brought glory or other great benefits to their people, the name of Dessalines shines above those of all his comrades in arms. Indeed, his historical role was by far preeminent, for he held the leadership at the most critical moments. He was at the forefront of the struggle, so he must have the first honors.35 Jean-​Jacques Dessalines not only personified Black dignity and heroism, in the words of Deborah Jenson, the founding father of Haiti also “personified symbolism.”36 In his critical appraisal of the Soulouque administration, I  would like to point out several historical factors Firmin observed. First, he consolidated his power effectively so that his ministers no longer had any influence or capability to counter it.37 Second, he approved an imperial constitution; hence, a nobility was created from scratch;38 Firmin states this political gesture was a rehearsal for King Christophe’s monarchy, and this sort of political organization is a categorical denial of democratic rule in Haiti.39 Under Soulouque’s monarchical government, democratic sentiment was pushed to excess.40 Third, despite his demeaning tyranny, mismanagement of public funds, and his ignorance, Emperor Soulouque had remained in power.41 Fourth, Firmin observed, on the one hand, that during the reign of Faustin I, the country had achieved social unity; on the other hand, Haiti was ridiculed by the international community and the League of Nations. When we talk about Emperor Faustin I, the thing that jumps out is the masquerade that made our young nation the laughingstock of civilized Europe. But when we get to the bottom of it, we will see that, during the twenty-​five years of Boyer’s reign, the elements that form Haitian nationality, by force to differentiate themselves—​intellectually and economically—​by a purely artificial means, that is to say, by a purely administrative selection that had reached a state of threatening dissociation, and even perilous for national development.42 In addition, a positive aspect of the Soulouque administration is that the emperor gave Black Haitians “a feeling of their personal worth, giving

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Forms of Firminism  97 them the assurance that they are fit to exercise, on a par with mulatto or white, a superior social role.”43 Firmin wrote further under this government, Blacks experienced social mobility and equality: “Such a transformation, to be happy, would require to be accomplished under a scientific and reasoned inspiration. It would be necessary to raise the Black to the level of the mulatto and the white.”44 The country experienced substantial social cohesion and harmony, and racial prejudice as well as class prejudice toward Blacks and peasants were significantly improved under Emperor Soulouque: Under the empire, sons of families or farmers, yellow or black, were merged into the line regiments, bound to a community of existence even more effective as they constantly had the prospect of being together. Side by side, on the battlefield, they had to rely on each other for support, in the face of a common danger. The public service ceased to be the lot of a special group of citizens, on an often-​ unjustified presumption of capacity.45 Both of Firmin’s parents, Pierre Montervil Firmin, a tailor by trade, and Anaise Jean Baptiste, a seamstress also by trade and the poto-​mitan of the Firmin family, would have experienced the political climate and social dynamics of the Soulouque administration. Arguably, their lives were transformed by the political order and social movements of their time. Both parents were born in the town of Grande Riviere du Nord. Firmin’s biological parents were committed to their son’s education and made tremendous sacrifices so he could become a statesman or servant to the Haitian people and a renowned thinker. Jean Price-​Mars, in his biography on Firmin, explains the social class that characterized the life of the Firmin family: It is therefore well established that the social origins of FIRMIN bear the mark of a fundamental humility, which will perhaps be the starting point of this irreducible feeling of the recovery of the condition of the popular and rural masses. Firmin would their future leader, and the uncompromising apostle of the Haitian people.46 Firmin’s social class and experience prepared him to empathize with the situation of the Haitian masses and to be a voice of reason and a vigorous activist for democracy in Haiti.

The Civil Servant and Politician-​Administrator In The Equality of the Human Races, Firmin alludes to his humble origins comparing himself to “a most remarkable Haitian, Monsieur Legitime, a man of profound intelligence and great moral character. Of working class origin, as are most Haitian Blacks, Legitime did not complete his

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98  Celucien L. Joseph education.”47 On the other hand, in this same text, Firmin presents Haiti as the antithesis to whiteness and the triumph of white supremacy in the history of ideas and culture in the West. For Firmin, Haiti represents the concrete materialization of what Black people have achieved in human history and could potentially achieve in creating future possibilities in the world. In other words, Firmin construes Haiti as both an ontological symbol and a historical reality in the African diaspora. It was in his secondary education that Firmin learned about the meaning of Black freedom and independence in Haiti. He was also taught how Haiti had provided an inspiration for Black people and oppressed people everywhere. Later in his writing, Firmin would defend the manifest destiny of Haiti and the representation of Haiti as a beacon of Black freedom and human rights. It is good to note that among his classmates and teachers, the young Firmin was known as a natural thinker and gifted student. He assimilated well in primary school and studied grammar, arithmetic, history, and geography; the young Firmin cultivated a great passion for reading and learning.48 He was one of the most brilliant students at his high school and eventually completed his secondary schooling in 1867 at the Lycée Philippe Guerrier in Cap-​Haïtien. At 17 years old, the young Firmin and other politically minded Haitian youths in Cap-​Haïtien participated in Salnave’s revolt against President Guillaume Fabre Nicolas Geffrard (1806–​1878). This remarkable action in 1867 is a significant event in Firmin’s life, as it underscores his early interest in the political life and his commitment to a democratic order in Haitian civil and political society—​which President Geffrard (1859–​ 1867) failed to achieve or demonstrate in his presidency—​according to some critics. Arguably, the young Firmin was a political visionary and champion of popular democracy in the making. Firmin’s soon-​ to-​ be political rival Demesvar Delorme (1831–​1901) also opposed President Geffrard’s undemocratic rule, as if it were the case in the final years of his presidency. As Firmin wrote: Geffrard’s fall from general disaffection. He played too much, while doing a meritorious work. But what overwhelmed him above all, apart from the weariness that he had with his government and which turned into universal repulsion, when he was elected for life, were the financial prejudices that were too justly criticized against his government. administration. Budgets were constantly in deficit. Millions of dollars were disappearing, unnoticed.49 As noted, the Haitian people lost trust in the Geffrard administration. They became dissatisfied with his governance—​the consistent budgetary deficit and excess in printing paper money that surpassed the authorized run, as well as financial corruption. In addition, President Geffrard disbanded the Legislature on June 3, 1863, leading to the triumph of despotic rule.50 Both Firmin and Delorme joined the revolution, as Salnave

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Forms of Firminism  99 and his insurrectionists were determined to oust the current president. In fact, in Réflexions diverses sur Haïti (1873), Delormes describes the historic protest and the unfolding events of this historic year. In 1867, Major Salnave deposed President Geffrard. He went into exile in Jamaica and died in Kingston on December 31, 1878. In the same vein, Salnave’s presidency would last only two years (1867–​1869), and throughout his administration, President Salnave battled with “guerrilla opposition from the cacos of the North, [and] was eventually driven from the capital in 1869.”51 When President Salnave and a small number of his troops fled to the neighboring country of Dominican Republic to escape the wrath of his enemies, he was captured and released to his rivals by General Cabral. The constitutionally elected president was executed on January 15, 1870, in front of the National Palace of Port-​au-​Prince, for having, as it was argued, violated the constitution of 1867.52 In October 18, 1871, Edmond Paul penned these words in Le Civilisateur: “The death of Salnave is the final submission of power to the laws.”53 Firmin writes both admirably and analytically about Salnave’s personality and administration, heroism and leadership, as well as his impact on his devoted followers: All those who followed him felt electrified and forgot that they would run to death when they faced, at his voice and after his example, lead and escape. Unfortunately, he was by no means prepared to exercise power and he saw nothing else, in the high position he occupied at the National Palace, than his heroic role as general-​in-​chief of the Haitian army he found the opportunity to exercise it in all the splendor of his warlike valor, he felt at his ease. He was happy!54 Firmin continues to underline Salvane’s moral leadership and political integrity. He has been accused of attempting to ruin the country and of defending his constitutionally established government, by any means necessary. According to Firmin, Salnave’s critics falsely accused him of these shortcomings and defamed his public character.55 Firmin did not hesitate to show the weakness of Salnave’s administration: During the two and a half years he has retained power, there is no serious administration of public interests, and the country was being torn apart by the bloodiest internal discussion. From the point of view of our national evolution, it would perhaps be well to pass a stroke of the pen on this epoch of desolation.56 Firmin was not only acquainted with the political history of Haiti. He also studied the history of human civilization, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, physical sciences, natural sciences, paleontology, comparative anatomy and physiology, and geography, which can be clearly observed in his profound intellectual engagement with these subjects in The Equality of the Human Races. Price-​Mars concludes that Firmin had “a first-​rate

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100  Celucien L. Joseph classical preparation.”57 Further, he remarks that Firmin also enjoyed the exceptional privilege of having had Jules Neff as his professor, a zealous humanist and a former graduate of the École Normale Supérieure of Paris. Like his teacher, Jules Neff, Firmin himself was a devout Black humanist and universalist, as he himself testified: I am Black. Moreover, I have always considered the religion of science as the only true one, the only one worthy of the attention and infinite devotion of any man who is guided by reason.58 Firmin correlates rationality with science and construes humanism as the antithesis to religious dogma. As a “man of science,” he affirms, “Science has been my only guide, and I  have neither the need nor the desire to stray from it.”59 For example, in his discussion on the question of human origins, as discussed in Chapter 4 on the theory of monogenism and polygenism, Firmin rejects the theological belief that supports monogenism; he prioritizes the scientific evidence for polygenism. When science is compared to religion to explain scientific phenomena and human origins, Firmin rejects religion and the biblical tradition. As he remarks: As for monogenism, it is an article of faith drawn from theological traditions, and its authority rests solely on a religious belief […] We should have no reason to criticize the polygenists had they confined themselves to the purely etymological sense of the word by which they designate their theory and argued from a single geographical location, as averred in the Biblical tradition.60 For an intellectually mature Firmin, science, not religion, has the final word. On the other hand, Firmin counters scientific racist ideas in intellectual modernity that assert that Black people are unable to arrive at a high level of spiritual pietism and religious maturity, and that they are “unable to rise above fetishism and totemism”61 because of their innate intellectual inferiority. In other words, Black people cannot truly worship God because their inclination toward religion is expressed through magic and sorcery. While Firmin does not engage explicitly in a theological argument to debunk these false theories, he affirms that Blacks and Africans do indeed articulate a superior conception of divinity. Second, he asserts that fetishism “was a special characteristic of the African mind” underlines the importance of evolutionary theory for late nineteenth-​century antiracist theorists, Haitians and others, in scientifically contesting racial hierarchies.62

Firmin, the Great Haitian Liberal I already mentioned that at the young age of 17, Firmin was politically conscious, and certainly, he became more intellectually and politically

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Forms of Firminism  101 mature in 1873. It is also good to note that Firmin worked as a professor, school inspector, lawyer, and journalist in his native Cap-​Haïtien. In nineteenth-​century Haitian politics, there were two dominant political parties in the country: the Parti Liberal (Liberal Party) and the Parti National (National Party). The slogan of the Liberal Party was “Le pouvoir aux plus Capables” (Power to the most capable), whereas the slogan of the National Party was “ Le pouvoir au plus grand nombre” (Power to the greatest number). Historically speaking, the members of the Liberal Party were overwhelmingly mulatto in composition, whereas the membership of the National Party was substantially composed of Black Haitians. National politicians claimed to be friends of the Haitian masses and so represented them in office; it has been observed that the Northern Province of the country was the source of the Party’s military power.63 Socially speaking, the Liberal Party, because of its composition of highly educated men of privilege, was “better established […] while the National Party tended to accommodate members of the petite bourgeoisie and other individuals who were ‘upwardly mobile.’ ”64 Price-​Mars, who wrote an excellent biography on Firmin and was not affiliated with either political party, but “was both liberal and a nationalist,”65 states that the Liberals in Cap-​Haïtien were comprised of individuals from “the high society” (la haute societe) and “the high life” (le high life).66 Firmin himself was a fervent Liberal who identified with the ideological position of the party, for example, the party’s commitment to the struggle against political despotism and militarism, yet he did not identify socially with the party, for he was of humble of origin.67 Bazelais and many of his mulatto Liberals belonged to the country’s oligarchic elite class that owned the country’s riches.68 Historian Laurent Dubois offers an important observation about the philosophy of both political parties and their attitude toward the color question in Haitian politics: The Liberals made no secret of the fact that the elites whom they put forward as Haiti’s best hope were mostly light-​skinned. The Nationals, on the other hand, believe that Haiti’s problems were mostly caused by mulatto politicians and by the weakness of black leaders who had allowed mulattoes to manipulate and use them.69 As has been observed, the members of Haiti’s two dominant political parties, the Liberal Party and the National Party, in the nineteenth century, wrestled to dominate the country’s political scene and electoral votes, and their attempt to gain hegemony in the country’s intellectual, educational, and cultural life was part of a long struggle in Haiti’s democratic process. Historically, from 1876 to 1879, the Liberal Party dominated the Haitian Parliament, and in 1876 and 1878, the chief delegates of the Liberal Party, Boyer Bazelais and Edmond Paul, developed a comprehensive political plan based on the doctrine and philosophy of the

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102  Celucien L. Joseph party.70 Michel-​Rolph Trouillot attributed the origin of the Liberal Party to political failure and the undemocratic governance of “the domination of an Executive led by ignorant generals.”71 At twenty-​three years old, Firmin embraced the ideology and promises of the Liberal Party, founded in 1870 by Bazelais and Paul. Thus, the Liberal Party was associated with the political and democratic ideas of the Haitian political thinkers and intellectuals Edmond Paul and Boyer Bazelais. Baselais was an influential Haitian jurist who studied law in Paris. Paul was a mentor to Firmin, and his early years, Firmin became a political representative of Boyer Bazelais in his native city. For Firmin, Edmond Paul symbolized the national conscience of Haiti, and in fact, he was the “convinced patriot” (le patriote convaincu) and “the highest embodiment of our national consciousness” (la plus haute incarnation de notre conscience nationale).72 Bazelais and Paul were highly educated men of prominent social status and privilege in Haitian society. The liberal discourse promoted an ethics of human efficiency and competency in Haitian politics, political stability and integrity, national independence and sovereignty, socialism, economic liberalism, and a limit on the power of the president. Firmin was heavily influenced by Paul’s classic text L’impot sur le Café (On the coffee tax) on political economy and state taxes. In this influential book, Paul explored questions related to coffee production, exportation, and taxation in Haitian society; for example, he urged the Haitian state to end the excessive taxes imposed on Haitian peasants and economically disadvantaged workers. Bazelais and Paul edited a small newspaper called Le Civilisateur that promoted the Liberal discourse as well as political commentaries on Haitian society. This daily newspaper also marked Firmin’s political and economic ideas; the liberal Haitian economist Edmond Paul articulated in this publication his radical ideas about the revolution of civilization to be achieved in Haiti.73 In The Equality of the Human Races, Firmin writes about both politicians with affection and passion, especially how Paul has shaped his own intellectual formation: his thoughts, his views, are indisputably elevated, weighty, and, most of all, eminently adapted to the needs of the Black race of Haiti as it strives for moral and intellectual progress. As for me, putting aside all political concerns, which in any case would be outside the purview of this book, I confess that I feel touched every time I am in the presence of this man. I am indeed keenly aware of the influence of his writings on my views and of the role they have played in my intellectual development.74 Further, he assesses the importance of Paul’s book on taxes on agricultural products in Haiti such as the coffee tax: Always consistent, he presents the facts in terms of their implications for the upward intellectual and moral mobility of the

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Forms of Firminism  103 Black populations of the plains. The central issue raised in Paul’s book is whether the coffee producer, the mountain farmer, is not so overwhelmed under the weight of taxes that he becomes unable to improve his material conditions and to raise his moral and intellectual level.75 In a felicitous language, he now praises Bazelais: Boyer Bazelais was a tireless worker, very knowledgeable in political science and international relations, and very competent in all those fields the Germans call Sciences camerales. In a European country, a man of such expertise would have seen able to compete with the most remarkable civil servants of our times.76 The underlying philosophy of the Liberal Party is that Haiti’s small elite group and educated intellectuals were the best to represent the will and desires of the Haitian people in the political sphere and to contribute to human flourishing in the Caribbean nation. Proponents of the Liberal Party like Paul, Bazelais, Firmin, and others were Haitian elitists who sought to integrate the doctrine and principles of Liberalism into the country’s civil and political societies, especially Haitian politics. Most of these intellectuals were educated in Paris and fervent promoters of the use of the French language in Haiti’s education system, its institutions, and government offices. In fact, Firmin in reference to the utilization of the French language in Haitian society states that “The Haitian who needs to evolve mentally, could not have conceived for a better linguistic tool.”77 Similarly, Dantes Bellegarde, a committed Firminist, energetically argued for “the adoption of French civilization rather than Anglo-​Saxonism” in the Haitian society.”78 The renowned constitutional scholar and prominent public intellectual Louis Joseph Janvier, who was affiliated with the National Party, wrote that “Les Haïtiens ne lisent que le Français”79 (Haitians read only French). The preferential option for the French language in Haiti and among nineteenth-​century Haitian intellectuals and men of letters signifies both their intellectual elitism and their deliberate ignorance of the alphabetic illiteracy of the Haitian masses. Moreover, historian Matthew J. Smith remarks that “Boyer Bazelais and the intellectuals he influenced like themselves believed in the enlightened and learned superiority of bourgeois men like themselves and displayed little faith in the political agency of the popular classes.”80 It is good to note that “liberalism first took shape in the battle against both the inherited patterns of social hierarchy and the economic ideas of mercantilism that together served as props for privilege in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”81 However, we can trace early liberalism to the political philosophy and doctrines of the Enlightenment. Haitian liberalism or the Liberal Party in Haiti championed the following principles and convictions. First, Haitian liberals were ardent Haitian nationalists who countered the color tension between Black and Haitian mulattoes. Second, they called for constitutional reform and monetary reform to

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104  Celucien L. Joseph allow for greater democracy and freedom, and economic/​fiscal stability in Haitian society. Third, they fought to eradicate the country’s military despotism and political corruption. Fourth, they believed that “a strong National Assembly should supersede the power of the executive.” Fifth, they maintained that “a civilian leadership would ensure democracy and improve Haiti’s international reputation. The party’s successful campaign to abolish tariffs on coffee exports also gained it support from rural populations, particularly the arrondissement of Miragoane.”82 Firmin, the Apostle of Haitian liberalism, spread its message through his literary production and political actions. Pierre Buteau, in an article entitled “Re-​situer Firmin,” highlights the influence of the doctrine of liberaliam upon Joseph Anténor Firmin: This doctrine was to mark both his work and his political action. His writings devoted to educational matters, to the organization of the city and the social regeneration of his fellow citizens clearly attest to this. His political action on the ground also reflects certain reflexes inherent in liberals—​which he gradually incorporated. Liberalism, which constitutes a formidable weapon in the struggle of “revolutionaries” against the old regime, manifests itself in all its glory, its dimensions, and its limits in the enterprise of the firminists.83 Moreover, liberalism promotes individual freedom, individual and property rights. Emphasis is placed on the private life over the corporate, collective life. Liberals believe in human harmony, social cohesion, and human progress. Liberals articulate an optimistic perspective about human life and the future. For liberals, human cooperation and solidarity are vital for human flourishing. There is also a strong commitment to internationalism and diversity. Some of the virtues of liberalism include fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence. Liberalism and democracy are intimately linked. Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd in their important book on the development of political movements and ideologies in the West offer a good summary of the nature and characteristics of liberalism. They explain that liberals are very cynical about the power of the state; state power is viewed as a potential threat to individual freedom. Institutional arrangements to restrain the state are therefore necessary; and the rule of the mob is as dangerous a threat as any tyrant. Private property and a market economy are efficient from an economic perspective, although at the same time may undermine other liberties.84 Claude Moise, in his influential book Constitution et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haiti, attempts a find a balance between the ideological worldview of the historic political parties of Haiti:

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Forms of Firminism  105 It is quite true that the nationals and the liberals engaged in a battle of ideas, and that they expressed their differences on all the major economic, social, and political questions. It is nevertheless evident that the history of the struggles between these two political groups presents the classic model of competition for state power. We first start by claiming this power, therefore by asserting our claim to legitimacy rather than superior national interests.85 Moise moves forward to show the compatibility between the two parties and how their ideologies have shaped Haitian politics throughout many decades.86 Evidently, both parties are concerned about the matter of social transformation and economic development, and about strengthening the political and social institutions in the country. Firmin was interested in the Liberal Party because of its broad interest in modernizing Haitian society and developing effective infrastructures to respond to the various needs of the Haitian state and the necessities of the Haitian people. It is significant to note that it was “under Firmin that the iron market of the capital was built in 1890 as well as the Palace of the six ministries and the great Abattois (‘slaughterhouse’) of Port-​au-​Prince.”87 As a prominent Haitian economist, Leslie Pean outlines five major changes Firmin effected in the Haitian economy in his role as minister of public finances between 1890 and 1891, and 1896 and 1897: 1. Firmin attacked the rent economy, more specifically the financial rent of speculators that ate up the Haitian economy and finances.88 2. Firmin fought the constant corruption of cutting down the tree to eat its fruit. In the Maroon State, Firmin refused to approve the unnecessary expenditures on various supplies and to be the hostage of the maroon brokers who pass the public effects between them before being paid for them by means of illicit commissions to relatives and friends.89 3. Firmin was not discouraged by the political factors that led to his resignation from the finance department in May 1891. He had excelled in his achievements, reducing Haiti’s external debt by 13 percent per year.90 4. Firmin pursued the objective of releasing financial resources to allow the state to invest in development instead of enriching financial speculators.91 5. However, despite this increase, Firmin managed to save money and not use monetary advances from the National Bank of Haiti to meet its obligations.92 It is good to add that Firmin’s philosophy of development emphasizes the contribution of both the individual and the collective within the category of the nation and the state as he explains in detail:

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106  Celucien L. Joseph In all countries, in all races, progress does not take place and becomes tangible until the lower social strata, which always form the majority, tends to rise in intelligence, power, dignity and well-​being. The so-​called enlightened policy or policy would consist only in perpetuating the inferiority of these layers, forming the very foundation of the nation. To keep the general masses in perpetuating ignorance is to postpone possible progress and the common good in society.93 As seen in this statement, Firmin’s philosophy of development gives emphasis to the social and economic factors of the Haitian poor and the marginalized class. He construes development as a practical reality that contributes to the general welfare of the Haitian people. Next, Firmin links his vision of national development with his patriotic zeal. Firmin is optimistic about the possibility of national renewal in his native land of Haiti: “A people is undoubtedly capable of resisting the most unhealthy sociological influences and of escaping for a long time from national dissolution, even in the midst of the causes which inevitably lead to it.”94 For Firmin, the Haitian nation must march toward modernity and toward sustaining development that would ensure its own national security and sovereignty, economic independence, political stability, and autonomy. Haiti must progress to justify its raison d’être and perseverance as an independent nation. Therefore, we must, at the same time, banish from our political existence this evil and occult force, which prevents us from evolving, from walking frankly towards the improvement of the people and to achieve a national civilization.95 While living in exile in Saint Thomas around 1910, the question of economic and moral development and the future of Haiti still baffled the elderly Firmin, who was 60 years old at the time. He reflected on Haiti’s lack of structural resources to effect radical internal changes; Firmin was also specific about the possibility of a robust and independent economic framework and comprehensive political vision to meet the fundamental needs of the Haitian people. However, to our great pity, the admirable people of Haiti coincides with an undeniable decrease in all the elements of progress which constitute the true strength of a nation. As our population grows, our purchasing capacity, as well as our productive power, decreases alarmingly. The low water level of public misery rises and falls, threatening to overwhelm positions considered to be the highest and most secure.96 Firmin reminds his compatriots that “If we do not go back, it is indisputable that we have not moved forward, while the others are moving forward.”97 Such critical reflection on the plight of the nation of Haiti and

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Forms of Firminism  107 the predicament of the Haitian people clearly indicates the heart of a true patriot, a committed nationalist.

Firmin, the Civil Servant, and the Haitian Society As a prominent statesman, Firmin served the Haitian state with a high degree of dignity and honesty. As a fervent promoter of Haitian democracy, he defended the inclusive rights and freedom of the Haitian people. Firmin believed that individual freedom was essential for any improvement of the human personality and life.98 His love for democracy is the engine that fueled him to categorically oppose Haitian despotism and political hostility. In the history of Haitian politics, Joseph Anténor Firmin is regarded by many as a model of statesmanship and political integrity. Firmin became a servant to the Haitian people with his great zeal for patriotism and nationalism. J.C. Dorsainvil acknowledges that “Firmin was a remarkable writer and an honest director who, by reacting vigorously against abuse, had twice sanitized the financial situation.”99 On January 5, 1878, Firmin founded Le Messager du Nord, a newspaper associated with the Liberal Party. Through this newspaper, Firmin offered political, cultural, and literary commentaries on matters relating to the Haitian nation and its political life. A year later, in January 1879, he participated in the parliamentary elections under the banner of the Liberal Party but failed to be elected as deputy to represent the city of Cap-​ Haïtien. The partisans of President Pierre Théoma Boisrond-​Canal falsely accused Firmin of being a mulatto in a predominantly color-​conscious Black nation. Firmin interprets this racial dilemma of color distinction and racial prejudice in Haitian society as a force nuisible100 (a harmful force) hindering the prospect of national unity and social coherence.

The Color Question and Racial Prejudice Firmin realized that racial prejudice between Black and mulatto Haitians paralyzed the sociological integrity of the Haitian nation and become an empty word for Haitian politics.101 Firmin characterizes the race problem as a social plague that contaminates the Haitian society, and it is as susceptible to infection as a traumatic injury.102 Firmin, as a critical social critic on human relations and interplays in the Haitian society reveals the racial wounds that have corrupted all human institutions and social relations in the country. It alienates people from each other and delays both individual and collective progress in the Haitian society. Firmin judiciously weighs the color question in the Haitian experience and history. The truth is that the question of color is for the use of all those who wish to perpetuate the night which reigns in the popular brain

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108  Celucien L. Joseph in Haiti and for personal benefit. Certainly, it is a dangerous weapon, the cause of all our misfortunes, all our missteps, all our long stagnation in the feelings of civilization. Yellow and black, and those who deny its existence exploit it for their own advantage. They are the worst enemies to the happiness and welfare of the Haitian people, and the rehabilitation of the black race.103 What is then Firmin’s solution to Haiti’s racial dilemma and the hostility between Black and mulatto Haitian citizens? In the following paragraphs, I would like to highlight a few promising proposals excavated from his excellent book M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, to help effect racial healing and reconciliation in Haitian society. Foremost, Firmin believes that it is crucial for all Haitians of different backgrounds to put an end to the ferment of social discord, which poisons every seed of national unity and harmony, and progress and civilization in our unfortunate homeland.104 Firmin admonishes the Haitian people that color prejudice transforms a nation and a people gradually, and it does not produce anything constructive in society; rather, it saturates the brain with bitterness and resentment.105 The optimistic Firmin envisions an optimistic nation and a people who are capable of healing themselves “with a lightness of the hand so as not to tense up our sick social body.”106 Next, Firmin calls upon the Haitian people to dispel false beliefs based on racist categories and acts of color prejudice. We are still there in our fruitless efforts. In the meantime, the country crumbles and falls, sliding into a rut that leads to final annihilation. To get out of it, it is important that those who defend the flag of political freedoms do not believe that their interest is to push back the majority of their fellow-​citizens—​not more in the social relation than in the political relation. It is important that those who aspire to be real, not artificial, and mythical equality, do not seek in suffocating civil liberties for the empirical and heinous means of lowering all heads to the same level.107 In addition, Firmin like his mentor Edmond Paul rejected any form of noirism and any policy of racialization of social relations in Haiti.108 Nicholls explains that “Firmin defended Christophe against the charge of having been prejudiced against the mulattoes and maintained that the colour question was the keystone of Boyer’s government.”109 The color question has also dominated the Haitian political scene and parliamentary power. For example, Firmin lost the election to the Haitian statesman and theorist Demesvar Delorme, who ran under the banner of the National Party. Interestingly, a year before the election, Delorme characterized Firmin as the “petit negre de La Fossette” (Little Black from La Fossette). La Fossette was a residential zone of uneducated and low-​income Haitians. Delorme was an influential Haitian thinker,

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Forms of Firminism  109 a remarkable synthesizer of Haitian ideas, and a prominent politician who served as the chief delegate of the National Party in the Haitian parliament. Firmin, nonetheless, was free of racial prejudice and did not interpret Haitian history and politics from a racially or color-​based point of view; yet he addressed the race problem in Haitian history as he had done in The Equality of the Human Races about the doctrine of white superiority and Black inferiority. Six years after this tragic event, Firmin, the great Haitian patriot and humanist, praised Delorme for his intellectual and literary achievements that contributed to the Haitian intellectual tradition. In literature, I will cite first and foremost Demesvar Delorme, a brown griffe, one of the most remarkable citizens of the young republic. He stands out not only because of his uncontestable talents as a writer, but also by his exceptional constancy as a man of letters, a constancy which denotes a mind essentially open to every form of beauty and appreciates and revels in every form of beauty. Monsieur Delorme did not complete his early education in Europe; he went there much later. This fact deserves to be noted, for it proves that his fine mind did not need direct contact with Western civilization to develop all its marvelous aptitudes. These aptitudes are innate in him, for they flourish in every human race during its historical evolution.110 Next, Firmin puts emphasis on the literary production of Delormes. He does so with grace, eloquence, and intellectual certitude.111 Clearly, Firmin appealed not only to the intelligence and intellectual aptitude of his Haitian compatriot Demesvar Delorme to debunk the doctrine of racial inequality and the inferiority of the Black race in his 1885 text, but Firmin also worked with the Haitian data to showcase the rich literary and intellectual tradition of his country. To substantiate his thesis, historian Brenda Plummer offers this important information about the Haitian intellectual response to the race problem in modernity: Haitian intellectuals of the nineteenth century were unfortunate enough to inhabit a universe that perceived as outlandish the idea that erudite blacks could nurture a tradition of research, teaching, and publication. Haitians might believe their intellectualism erased the stigma of mental inferiority that racist enemies had imposed, but to their critics this merely proved the case against them.112 Haitian liberals were individuals who fought energetically the race question not only in their own country but also in the world. Moreover, it is good to take into account that Firmin’s mentor Edmond Paul, the founder of the Liberal Party as previously noted, shared parallel ideas with Demesvar Delorme on national development and progress, economic reform, and modernization in Haiti. Both Delorme and Paul wanted to

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110  Celucien L. Joseph eliminate the military regime in Haiti; paradoxically, it seemed rather that they thought that the task of the soldier was to maintain order and to protect work in Haitian society.113 On the other hand, it is important to note that around 1873, while Firmin was calling upon the Haitian government to engage in economic partnership with the United States rather than France, Delorme articulated a different perspective, urging the Haitian state to cut its diplomatic relations with the United States. Prior to the publication of The Equality of the Human Races in 1885, Firmin was actively engaged in the political life and affairs of his country; he opposed the unfavorable rule and policies of the new President Salomon (1879–​1888), who affiliated with the National Party. As a result, he would experience his first exile in Saint Thomas, and afterward, relocate to France. Yet the same year (1883), President Salomon selected Firmin to represent Haiti in Caracas, Venezuela, for the Simón Bolívar Centennial Celebration. Firmin would stay in France for the next five years serving his country as a diplomat abroad and would return to his native land in 1888. When Firmin returned to Haiti in 1888, the country was experiencing political turmoil and civil disaccord. Without any hesitation, he joined the Revolutionary Committee that was responsible for the departure of President Salomon in August 1888. It is in this same year or 1889 (as some historians have maintained) that Firmin was officially appointed minister of foreign relations, finances, and commerce. Another milestone in Firmin’s life as statesman was his economic contribution to crafting the 1889 constitution. He participated in the Constitutional Assembly on September 19, 1889; a series of five meetings, occurred in Gonaives, over a period of fifteen days (September 19–​October 9, 1888). Firmin and his eminent jurist-​friend Léger Cauvin were instrumental in shaping the content and provisions of the new constitution. Mirlande Manigat, in her excellent article underscoring what she has phrased “la dimension juridique du firminisme” (The legal dimension of Firmnism), highlights the labor of Joseph Anténor Firmin in unparalleled exegetical precision and in the most exalted rhetoric. She explains: The Constituent Assembly of 1889 is thus grasped as a moment in the evolution of Antenor Firmin’s thought, a stage in the formulation of his concerns. His legal training and professional practice as a lawyer had convinced him of the need to confront idea and action.114 Manigat explores another important dimension in Firmin’s life, particularly his respect for the law and the constitution; thus, for Manigat, Joseph Anténor Firmin was a “man of the law and the rule of law” (Homme de la loi et de l’État de droit). Above all, he [Firmin] believed in the founding and redemptive virtue of the Law, which he maintained was the necessary basis for the

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Forms of Firminism  111 modernization of a country which had just emerged from the political and military convulsions and marked the dramatic conjuncture between the departure of President Lysius Salomon on August 10, 1888, the interlude of the brief passage to power of Denis François Légitime (December 16, 1888–​August 22, 1889) and the election of Florvil Hyppolyte on October 9, 1889.115 Moreover, during the administration of President Louis Mondestin Florvil Hyppolite (1889–​1896), Firmin served as minister of finance, commerce, and foreign affairs. Firmin was viewed as “an honest and capable Finance Minister” by the administration and his compatriots. Comparably before Firmin’s appointment, it is reported that the country’s public debt had soared to $20 million as a result of the revolution and of $4.4 million in paper money run off by President Legitime or imported from New York by President Hyppolite.116 “During his first year, Firmin reduced the debt by 13 percent and retired a million dollars’ worth of paper by virtue of an equivalent loan floated on advantageous terms with the merchants of Port-​au-​Prince.”117 After his labor on the new constitution, Firmin resigned from his position, and consequently, returned to his hometown of Cap-​Haïtien to practice law. I  would like to note four major contributions Firmin as an influential leader of the Constitutional Assembly made to the 1889 constitution: 1. Firmin “protested the ban on foreign ownership” in Haiti, as the constitution of 1888 formerly outlawed ownership of real estate. He “suggested lessening restrictions on foreign investment on the grounds that the law was outmoded and the need for capital dire enough to warrant unprecedented efforts to attract it.”118 2. Firmin urged the Constitutional Assembly to include whites in the political society based on the principle of universal brotherhood.119 3. Firmin admonished the Constitutional Assembly to always leave a door open to those who wanted to enter it, and not to practice exclusion against the deleterious elements whose acquisition would be a danger for the country.120 4. Firmin advocated a system of ministerial accountability to parliament with the corollary of accounting for the functions of minister and parliamentarian.121 5. Firmin won his argument by persuading the Assembly to amend Article 4 of the constitution to replace “All Africans” (Tout African) by “All foreigners and their descendants are able to become Haitian.” (“Tout African” par “Tout étranger et ses descendants sont habiles à devenir Haïti.”)122 Article 7 of the constitution, which Firmin called for changing, was also the subject of Edmond Paul’s concern in the early 1860s. Being worried

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112  Celucien L. Joseph about the preservation of Haiti’s sovereignty and his sensibility regarding anti-​Black racism, Paul declares that “To accord the right of property to whites, while colour prejudice is still prevalent, would be to renounce the end which the nation pursues.”123 Paul also argued that “The prosperity of whites is based on the degradation of blacks.”124 Paul’s plan of political economy substantially influenced Firmin. Paul called for a protectionist trade policy to protect indigenous industries that produced soap, candles, ink, paper, cooking oil, shoes, clothing, glasses, bricks, and so forth.125 He also argued that the Haitian government must encourage scientific development and industrial education to produce the professionals and scientists (teachers, engineers, science teachers, builders, and so on) necessary for the development of the Haitian nation, which was opposed by major European and American trade partners and industries.126 As Pean has rightly interpreted, “For Firmin, Edmond Paul’s economic ideas were enlightening until the end of his life.”127 When Firmin instituted a change in Article 7 in the 1889 constitution to allow “strangers” or “whites” to own property in Haiti, he may have foreseen the potential contribution white investors could bring to the Haitian economy, contributing to the country’s development and fiscal balance. In his Lettres de Saint Thomas, written in 1910, during his time of exile on the Danish island, Firmin’s conviction about the imperative of economic development and progress in Haiti by inviting foreign investors and trade allies to contribute to that end is more substantive. Firmin contends that to promote work and develop national resources, the Haitian government must attract foreign capital to the country by lowering all artificial and unnecessary obstacles or structures.128 By inviting foreigners to invest in Haiti, Firmin supported the idea that such intervention would create and help develop Haiti’s national resources. As can be argued, Firmin’s constitutional intervention in 1889 ensuring the reception of foreign investors and real estate in Haiti was a strategic political move to improve Haiti’s economic resources and diplomatic relations with other nations. Having made this observation, it is good to note that many who lived in the 1880s believed that the Haitian constitution of 1889 was both original and very liberal; however, Louis Joseph Janvier noted that it “repeats Articles 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, and the dispositions of articles 137, 138, 139, and 141 of the Constitution of 1843.”129 In 1891, Firmin would experience his third exile to France. Before he went into exile, he met with Frederick Douglass, who then served as the US Consul to Haiti, and eventually with US Navy Admiral Gherardi to discuss the American interest in establishing a naval base in the coastal region of Môle Saint-​Nicolas. On April 22, 1893, Firmin replied with a “no” answer to the American delegates. He rejected the diplomatic interest to the cession of Môle St. Nicolas to the American government. In Europe, Firmin served as a diplomat in France and Germany. As Heinl remarks,

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Forms of Firminism  113 There could be no lease of the Mole because Haiti’s constitution precluded any such alienation of sovereignty. Moreover, Haiti would not—​could not—​negotiate under the guns of seven foreign warships or, for that matter, under the bullying of the American press.130 Firmin did not remain minister of foreign affairs for long; he resigned in May 2, 1891, to protest against the decision of President Hyppolite to change the status of the representative of Haiti in Berlin from plenipotentiary minister to resident minister even before the principle of reciprocity was accepted by the German government.

Firmin and His Political Rivals Having been accused of charges of corruption by the new minister of finance, M.  Stewart, who replaced him in 1891, Firmin defended his record and discussed his contributions to the reorganization of the national budget and economic revolution in the country. For Firmin, 1893 was a historic year. After returning to Haiti, he met with the eminent Cuban intellectual and patriot José Martí (1853–​1895), who was touring through the Caribbean. These two met in May in Cap-​Haïtien. Firmin made a great impression on Marti; Marti said that he had met “a great Haitian.” The two became good friends and explored the idea of initiating the Caribbean Confederation project. It is worth noting here that Marti had traveled to Cap-​Haïtien three times between 1892 and 1895 to seek political assistance for the struggle for the independence of Cuba. In his Lettres de Saint Thomas, Firmin explains this historic meeting with Martin: In 1893, I had occasion to confer with the incomparable Jose Marti in Cap Haitien. The great patriot, upon whom a grateful Cuba later bestowed the title of apostle, presented himself in the name of Doctor Betances, who had recommended that he see me. Our meetings revolved around the great question of Cuban independence, and the possibility of an Antillean confederation. With the exception of certain practical reservations, we were in absolute accord as to principles. We were drawn to each other by an irresistible sympathy. Informed of the audacious enterprise that his man—​eloquent, well-​ informed, inspired and of an unusually broad spirt, determined and tenacious—​was fostering, preparing and heralding, with the zeal of an illuminato and apostolic devotion, I did what I ought to do everywhere on behalf of a sacred cause.131 In 1898, Firmin would experience his third exile. A year later, in July 12, 1900, he was nominated as minister plenipotentiary in Paris by President Tirésias Augustin Simon Sam (1896–​1902). While in Paris, he attended the historic First Pan-​African Congress that took place in London, from

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114  Celucien L. Joseph July 23 to 25, 1900. In the City of Light, Firmin met representatives from the African diaspora such as the African American intellectual and historian W.E.B. Du Bois, the Haitian Pan-​Africanist and lawyer Benito Sylvain, and the Trinidadian intellectual and lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams. Firmin’s Pan-​Africanism is well documented in The Equality of the Races. There were two major events in 1902 in the life of Firmin and Haitian politics. First, Firmin buried in Haiti his only daughter, Anna Marie, who died in Paris. (Ten years later, he would lose his only son, Georges Eberle, during a sea trip from Cap-​Haïtien to Port-​au-​Prince. President Sam left the presidency on May 13, 1902.) Second, Firmin participated in the presidential election in the same year but lost his presidential bid to General Nord Alexis. It is important to note here that after Firmin returned to Haiti to bury the remains of his daughter in his native city Cap-​Haïtien, Firmins’s supporters, that is, the Firminists, including Haitian intellectuals, professionals, and politically conscious citizens, persuaded Firmin “to accept the position of president of the northern committee. They also encouraged him to run in the upcoming July elections as a deputy for Gonaives.”132 The logical reason behind this recommendation was that “Success in the election would strengthen his chances of becoming president.”133 By contrast, it was observed that “Firmin’s objective was to pursue an electoral not physical contest for power, presenting himself as a civilian alternative to the political control of generals.”134 Price-​Mars clarifies that Firmin had an immense opportunity to rally a large number of high-​ranking political and military personalities to his dual legislative and presidential candidacy; for example, he was warmly welcomed by Admiral Killick at “Crete-​a-​Pierrot” in the harbor of Cap-​Haïtien.135 On the other hand, Louis Joseph Janvier expresses a counterperspective. He reasonably concludes that the civil war of 1902 between the Firminists and the supporters of President Alexis had invited foreign powers to intervene in the country’s internal affairs and that Haiti’s military presidents had actively engaged in meaningless struggles that had historically deferred the progressive march of Haiti. Joseph stated that Haiti’s political turmoil had cast doubt on the aptitude of the Black race to govern itself.136 The idea of a Firminist insurgency supported radical reform of the country’s political institutions and systems, strengthened Haiti’s foreign relations, and minimized the influence of the Haitian army and the political realm. Opposed by the Haitian army and the country’s elite class, the Firminist insurgency failed and resulted in civil war. To defend democracy in Haiti and his own political interests, Firmin took up arms to fight his opponents, chiefly President North Alexis and his supporters. After he failed in his bid for the presidency, Firmin was sent to live in exile in St. Thomas, where he would become more engaged in his political writings and intellectual reflections about the Haitian state and Haitian society. He would not return to Haiti until 1910.

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Forms of Firminism  115 It must be noted that the Firminists, both in Haiti and abroad, continued to oppose the presidency of Nord Alexis that resulted in political turmoil and civil unrest in the country. Historian Matthew J. Smith substantiates that “Since 1902 Firminists had proved far more threatening to Alexis’s position during his six years of rule”137 than any groups of opposition in the country. On the other hand, for some critics, Firmin and Nord Alexis as northerners “represented divisions not only among regional residents, but also among the intellectual elite of Port-​au-​Prince who could see an ally in the erudite Firmin.”138 This great political rift between President Nord Alexis and the distinguished public intellectual and statesman Joseph Anténor Firmin occurred at an unfortunate historical moment when the country was getting ready to celebrate the centennial of its independence and sovereignty.

Conclusion Having been tormented by the undemocratic state headed by the current president, Firmin envisioned a new political system where democratic life would be extended to all Haitians. He engaged in an armed boat fight with his opponents. The latter was stronger militarily; Firmin’s militia was defeated. In his final exile to Saint Thomas, Firmin died peacefully there on September 27, 1911. In the history of Haitian intellectual tradition and political life, Firmin symbolizes essentially the power of ideas. For both Manigat and Price-​ Mars, Firmin, the distinguished Haitian statesman, was a national martyr and a victim of the Haitian state due to his honesty and his determination to maintain an image of scrupulous and deserved prohibition in the eyes of his main adversary.139 Both patriotism and nationalism as a twin ideology in the Firminist doctrine led to the eventual death of Anténor Firmin in exile outside of his native land.

Notes 1 For more information, consult my article, Joseph, “Anténor Firmin, the ‘Egyptian Question’ and Afrocentric Imagination,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7:2 (October 2014):1–​53. 2 Firmin, Lettres de Saint Thomas, v. 3 Eyma, “Anténor Firmin: L’intellectuel engage, l’homme politique compétent et intègre,” 27. 4 Bellegarde, Histoire du peuple d’Haiti, 286. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 287. 7 Ibid., 288. 8 Péan, Comprendre Anténor Firmin, 67. 9 See Marc Péan, Vingt-​cinq ans de vie capoise: L’illusion héroïque (1890–​ 1902) (1977) and L’échec du firminisme (mai 1902–​decembre 1902) (1980). 10 Manigat, Anténor Firmin. Les moments marquants d’une vie, 7. 11 Ibid., 8.

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116  Celucien L. Joseph 2 Georges, Theater and Diplomatic Illusions in Haiti, iv. 1 13 Manigat, Anténor Firmin. Les moments marquants d’une vie, 9. 14 Casimir, “The Sovereignty People of Haiti,” in Julia Gaffield, The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 192. 15 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 294. 16 Ibid., 295. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.,  295–​6. 21 Ibid., 296. 22 Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, lviii. 23 Ibid. 24 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 297. 25 Ibid.,  298–​9. 26 Ibid., 399. 27 Casimir, “The Sovereignty People of Haiti,” in Julia Gaffield, The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 193. 28 Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 368. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Jenson, “Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence,” in Julia Gaffield, The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 72. 37 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 361. 38 Ibid., 365. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.,  365–​6. 42 Ibid., 366. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 367. 46 Price-​Mars, Antenor Firmin, 15. 47 Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 319. 48 Prophète, “Centième anniversaire d’ Anténor Firmin,” in Cary Hector, L’actualité d’Anténor Firmin, 298. 49 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des Etats-​Unis, 384. 50 Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, 223. 51 Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 109. 52 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 391. 53 Qtd in Moise, Constitution et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, 251. 54 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 386. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 387. 57 Price-​Mars, Antenor Firmin, 17.

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Forms of Firminism  117 58 Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, lv. 59 Ibid., 77. 60 Ibid., 78. 61 Ibid., 79. 62 Ramsey, The Spirits, and the Law, 94. 63 Shannon, Jean Price-​ Mars, and the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation, 22. 64 Bellegarde-​Smith, In the Shadow of Powers, 50. 65 Shannon, Jean Price-​ Mars, and the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation, 21. 66 Price-​Mars, Vilbrun Guillaume-​Sam Ce Méconnu, 23. 67 Manigat, Anténor Firmin. Les moments marquants d’une vie,  13–​14. 68 Ibid., 14. 69 Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, 181. 70 Janvier, Du Gouvernement Civil en Haïti,  73–​4. 71 Trouillot, Haïti: State against Nation, 98. 72 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 416. 73 Péan, Comprendre Anténor Firmin, 68. 74 Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 76. 75 Ibid., 221. 76 Ibid., 77. 77 Qtd in Bellegarde-​ Smith, In the Shadows of Powers, 50; Firmin, M. Roosevelt President des États-​Unis, vii. 78 Bellegarde-​Smith, In the Shadows of Powers, 50. 79 Janvier, Du Gouvernement Civil en Haïti, 75. 80 Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile, 198. 81 Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism, 25. 82 Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile, 198. 83 Buteau, “Re-​ Situer Firmin,” in Cary Hector, L’actualité d’Anténor Firmin, 140. 84 Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd, Understanding Political Ideas and Movements, 211–​12. 85 Moise, Constitution et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti, 289–​90. 86 Ibid.,  300–​2. 87 Péan, Comprendre Antenor Firmin, 82. 88 Ibid., 97; Pean deploys the concept of the “marroon state” as a critique of the Haitian state. 89 Péan, Comprendre Antenor Firmin, 98, 90 Ibid.,  98–​9. 91 Ibid., 99. 92 Ibid., 101, 93 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 416–​17. 94 Ibid., 418. 95 Ibid., 417. 96 Firmin, Lettres de Saint Thomas,  V–​VI. 97 Ibid. 98 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 239. 99 Qtd. in Bellegarde, Histoire du peuple haïtien, 271. 100 Firmin, M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis, 418. 101 Ibid., 418–​19.

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118  Celucien L. Joseph 02 Ibid., 422. 1 103 Ibid.,  426–​7. 104 Ibid., 422. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid.,  428–​9. 108 Pean, Comprendre Antenor Firmin, 64. 109 Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 125. 110 Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 221. 111 Ibid., 211. 112 Plummer, Haiti, and the United States, 71. 113 See Trouillot, Demesvar Delorme, 17. 114 Manigat, “Anténor Firmin: Homme de la loi et de l’Etat de droit,” 158. 115 Ibid. 116 Heinl and Heinl, Written in the Blood, 311. 117 Ibid., 311–​12. 118 Plummer, Haiti, and the United States, 74. 119 Qtd in Péan, Comprendre Antenor Firmin, 74. 120 Ibid. 121 Moise, Constitution et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti,  354–​6. 122 Qtd in Péan, Comprendre Antenor Firmin, 76. 123 Qtd in Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 103. 124 Paul, Questions politico-​économiques, Tome II, 70. 125 Paul, Questions politico-​économiques, Tome I, 30–​31 ; Péan, Comprendre Anténor Firmin,  64–​6. 126 Ibid. 127 Péan, Comprendre Anténor Firmin, 65. 128 Firmin, Lettres de Saint Thomas, IV. 129 Janvier, Du Gouvernement Civil en Haïti, 78; in his book, Janvier offers examples of both the continuity and discontinuity of both constitutions: 1843 and 1889. 130 Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, 317. 131 Firmin, “On the Caribbean Confederation,” in Laurent Dubois, Glover, et al., The Haitian Reader,  171–​2. 132 Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile, 302. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Price-​Mars, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam-​Ce Méconnu, 45. 136 Janvier, Du Gouvernement Civil en Haïti, 84. 137 Ibid., 301. 138 Zavitz, “Revolutionary Commemorations,” in Julia Gaffield, The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 230. 139 Manigat, Antenor Firmin. Les moments marquants d’une vie, 53.

Bibliography Bellegarde-​Smith, Patrick. Dantes Bellegarde in Haitian Social Thought. Second Edition. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019.

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Forms of Firminism  119 Buteau, Pierre. “Re-​situer Firmin.” In Cary Hector. L’actualité d’Anténor Firmin: Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain. Port-​au-​Prince : Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti. pp. 131–​153. Casimir, Jean. “The Sovereign People of Haiti during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Julia Gaffield. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016. pp. 181–​200. Droui-​Hans, Anne-​Marie. “Hierarchy of Races, Hierarchy in Gender: Antenor Firmin and Clémence Boyer.” Ludus Vitalis, vol. XIII, num. 23, 2005, pp. 163–​180. Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New  York: Metropolitan Books, 2012. Eyma, Emile. “Anténor Firmin: L’intellectuel engage, l’homme politique compétent et intègre.” In Cary Hector. L’actualité d’Anténor Firmin: Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain. Port-​au-​Prince: Editions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti. pp. 23–​34. Firmin, Joseph Anténor. L’effort dans le mal. Port-​au-​Prince: Imprimerie H. Chauvet, 1911. Firmin, Joseph Anténor. De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive). Paris: F. Pichon, 1885; Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003; Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2005. Firmin, Joseph Anténor. The Equality of the Human Races. Trans. Asselin Charles. Intr. Carolyn Fluehr-​Lobban. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Firmin, Joseph Anténor. Lettres de Saint Thomas. Études sociologiques, historiques et littéraires. Paris: V. Girard & E. Brière, 1910. Firmin, Joseph Anténor. M. Roosevelt, président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti. New York: Hamilton Bank Note Engraving and Printing Company /​ Paris, F. Pichon et Durand-​Auzias, 1905. Firmin, Joseph Anténor. “On the Caribbean Confederation.” In Laurent Dubois, Glover et  al., The Haitian Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2020. pp. 169–​175. Georges, Jacques-​Raphaël Georges. Theater and Diplomatic Illusions in Haiti. Xlibris Corp, 2020. Harrison, Kevin and Tony Boyd. Understanding Political Ideas and Movements. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Heinl, Robert Debs and Nancy Gordon Heinl. Written in the Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1491–​1971.Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978. Janvier, Louis Joseph. Du Gouvernement civil en Haïti; avec le portrait de l’auteur. Lille: Le Bigot frères, 1905. Jenson, Deborah. “Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence: Tigers and Cognitive Theory.” In Julia Gaffield. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016. pp. 72–​91. Joseph, Celucien L. “Anténor Firmin, the ‘Egyptian Question’ and Afrocentric Imagination.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7:2 (October 2014):1–​53. Kloppenberg, James T. The Virtues of Liberalism. London: Oxford University Press, 1998. Manigat, Leslie F. Anténor Firmin. Les moments marquants d’une vie, le temps fort d’une doctrine et d’une pratique politique. Port-​au-​Prince: CHUDAC, 2010.

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120  Celucien L. Joseph Manigat, Mirlande. “Anténor Firmin: l’homme de la loi et de l’Etat de Droit.” In Cary Hector. L’actualité d’Anténor Firmin: Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain. Port-​ au-​Prince: Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti. pp. 155–​193. Moise, Claude. Constitution et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haïti. Tome 2: La Solution Américaine (1915–​1946). Port-​ au-​ Prince: Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, 2009. Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Paul, Edmond. Les causes de nos malheurs. Kingston, Jamaica, 1882. Paul, Edmond. De l’impôt sur les cafés et lois de commercer intérieur. Kingston, Jamaica, 1876. Paul, Edmond. Œuvres posthumes Tome I. Paris: Vve C. Dunod et P. Vicq, 1896. Paul, Edmond. Questions politico-​économiques, vol. II: Formation de la richesse nationale. Paris: Imprimerie de P. A. Bourdier, 1863. Péan, Leslie. Comprendre Anténor Firmin : Une inspiration pour le XXIe siècle. Port-​au-​Prince: Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, 2012. Péan, Marc. L’Echec du Firminisme. Port-​au-​Prince: Impr. Henri Deschamps,  1987. Péan, Marc. L’échec du firminisme (mai 1902–​decembre 1902). Port-​au-​Prince: Impr. Henri Deschamps, 1980. Péan, Marc. La ville éclatée (décembre 1902–​juillet 1915). Haïti, 1993. Péan, Marc. Vingt-​ cinq ans de vie capoise: L’illusion héroïque (1890–​ 1902). Port-​au-​Prince: Impr. Henri Deschamps, 1977. Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Price-​Mars, Jean. Jean-​Pierre Boyer Bazelais et le drame de Miragoáne; á propos d’un lot d’autographes, 1883–​1884. Port-​au-​Prince: Impr. de l'Etat, 1948. Price-​Mars, Jean. Joseph Anténor Firmin. Port-​ au-​ Prince: Impr. Séminaire Adventiste, 1978. Price-​Mars, Jean. Vilbrun Guillaume-​ Sam: ce méconnu. Port-​au-​Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1961. Prophète, Luc. “Centième anniversaire d’Anténor Firmin.” In Cary Hector. L’actualité d’Anténor Firmin: Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain. Port-​au-​Prince: Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti. pp. 295–​323. Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Shannon, Magdaline W. Jean Price-​Mars, the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation, 1915–​1935. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Smith, Matthew J. Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Trouillot, Ernst. Demesvar Delorme: le journaliste, le diplomate. Port-​au-​Prince: Impr. N.A. Theodore, 1958. Trouillot, Michel-​Rolph. Haiti: State against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990. Zavitz, Erin. “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-​ Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–​ 1904.” In Julia Gaffield. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016. pp. 219–​237.

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Part 2

Firmin, Black Internationalism, and Pan-​Africanism

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6  Anténor Firmin, Pan-​Africanism, and the Struggle for Race Vindication Gershom Williams

Introduction In addition to his Pan-​Africanist writing, (Antenor) Firmin was an activist in the early Pan-​ African movement and was one of two delegates from Haiti at the first Pan-​African Congress of 1900 in London. –​Immanuel Geiss Paradoxically and ironically, it was during the exact same historical season in the year 1885 when Anténor Firmin published his seminal text The Equality of the Human Races, that the notorious European “Scramble for Africa” also ensued. In the winter of 1884–​85, fourteen European nations gathered in Berlin, Germany, to create rules on how to peacefully divide Africa among themselves for maximum economic exploitation and political hegemony. The conference was convened by Portugal but led by Otto Von Bismarck, chancellor of the newly united Germany. In addition to Portugal and Germany, thirteen other European nations in attendance were Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Austria-​ Hungary, Denmark, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Turkey and the United States of America. The Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo Conference or West African Conference, regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the age of New Imperialism and coincided with Germany’s sudden rise as an imperial power. In the aftermath, only two Africa nations remained non-​colonized by Europe, Ethiopia and Liberia. In summary, the Berlin Conference of 1885 was an obvious attempt at European consolidation of global power and a “race first” ideology. Fifteen years later, a much needed and necessary collective response to Europe’s debilitating global schemes was met head-​on with ideological, political and cultural oppositional aims by thirty delegates at the London, England, Pan-​African Conference of 1900. The latter inaugural gathering of the Sons of Africa, mainly from England and the West Indies, attracted only a few continental Africans and African Americans. For the first

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124  Gershom Williams time in modern history, unified opponents of racism, colonialism and global imperialism gathered for an international meeting to discuss a Pan-​ African response and strategic agenda to overcome their oppression and collective humiliation. As a broader political concept, Pan-​Africanism’s roots lie in the collective experiences of African descendants in the Black Atlantic or the so-​called New World. Since the inaugural Pan-​African Conference convened in 1900, there have been a series of eight follow-​up meetings in various locations around the world.

• • • • • • • •

1919 in Paris (1st Pan-​African Congress) 1921 in London (2nd Pan-​African Congress) 1923 in London (3rd Pan-​African Congress) 1927 in New York City (4th Pan-​African Congress) 1945 in Manchester, England (5th Pan-​African Congress) 1974 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (6th Pan-​African Congress) 1994 in Kampala, Uganda (7th Pan-​African Congress) 2014 in Accra, Ghana (8th Pan-​African Congress)

All of the aforementioned Congresses were intended to address the global economic, political and cultural issues facing continental and diasporan African people as a result of European destabilization, or as Walter Rodney has correctly coined it, the “underdevelopment” of Africa since the latter fifteenth century. Joseph Anténor Firmin (1880–​1911) has been duly recognized by a global community of scholars in higher education as an anthropologist, Egyptologist, Africologist, a philosopher and a Pan-​Africanist. Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races (1885), has been acknowledged by numerous contemporary writers as a significant and remarkable early work of Pan-​Africanist discourse. Rhode Island College and Cleveland State University professors Carolyn Fluer Lobban and, more specifically, Jeff Karem have written on Firmin’s Pan-​Africanist thinking and activism. Indeed, it was in 1895, a full five years prior to the first historic Pan-​African conference that Benito Sylvain, Henry Sylvester Williams and Anténor Firmin began their years of collective dialogue and written correspondence that eventually culminated in the conference of 1900. Before actually sharing the authentic letters of correspondence with the reader, I would like to first disclose an illuminating commentary written by Trinidadian journalist Owen Charles Mathurin: In early 1895, Sylvain deeply concerned about the position of Blacks and the scorn with which the White world regarded them, had sought the advice of a fellow countryman, Antenor Firmin, Haitian minister to France, on the idea of a world ethnological congress as part of the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900. Firmin, while foreign minister

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Anténor Firmin, Pan-Africanism  125 in 1891, had won renown for Haiti’s victory in a diplomatic battle with the United States, which was pressing for a lease of the Mole St. Nicholas on its northern coast for a naval and coaling station. He was also the author of On the Equality of the Human Races (1885), countering Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Equality of the Human Races (1853–​1855). Firmin was to be made Vice President for Haiti of the Pan-​African Association. The ethnological congress Sylvain proposed and Firmin supported would have brought together learned men and spokesmen of the African race to discuss and settle finally the question of inferior and superior races. As he saw it, the Congress would be an appeal to modern science, which he considered ‘more impartial and better informed’ than the old science, which, to salve the conscience of a slave owning Europe, had proclaimed the innate inferiority of Blacks […] After his discussions with Williams and Firmin, Sylvain agreed that instead of the ethnological congress they should call a meeting of delegates from the people of African descent with European learned men, philanthropists and politicians. (Mathurin 1976:49) In his groundbreaking literary work, The Pan-​African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond, Dr. Tony Martin includes a monumental chapter titled “Benito Sylvain of Haiti on the Pan-​African Conference of 1900.” It is within the latter chapter that these letters of correspondence between Benito Sylvain and Anténor Firmin are chronicled. Eminent and dear compatriot, Since I am certain of obtaining from you both encouragement and support, as well as the judicious counsel which will ensure success. I  would like to communicate to you a project, the realization of which, I  believe, will advance to a very great degree the work of rehabilitating the Black race, a work which, as you well know, I am devoted body and soul. The detractors of our race are of two sorts: 1) Those who, incapable of seeking out the why’s and wherefores of phenomena which astound their narrow minds, receive and transmit, without even suspecting the gravity of what they are doing, unfortunate ideas which the apologists for slavery had such a great interest in propagating and which they were able to make the ignorant masses accept without too much trouble; 2) Those who, being in a position to deflate the a priori judgments commonly foisted upon people of color, are nevertheless restrained from doing so doing by a stubborn racial chauvinism. These latter, instead of trying to stop it, deliberately go along with a prejudice which is compounded by the fact that it originates in errors which are being passed off as science. Now I  am convinced, as you are, that the execrable theory of inferior and superior races is a moral monstrosity which is based, whatever one might say, solely on the idea of the exploitation of man

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126  Gershom Williams by man. It has served, in centuries past as a justification for the most revolting of social inequities, it still exercises in our time an even more evil influence. What! In this century of enlightenment, in which no theory is accepted unless it has been supported by irrefutable proof, is the dogmatic opinion concerning the inferiority of Blacks to be maintained still, without any other basis than the self-​interested belief of those who profess it? That cannot be. No! The Black man was not created to be a footstool for White power. To all those who dare to support this position we reply fearlessly, whatever may be their high standing in scientific circles. “You insult the objectivity of science!” The African race today contains too many outstanding men, both in terms of intelligence and moral uprightness, to continue to exist in the same state of prostration, under the burden of a scorn as outrageous as it is unjustified. Scholars, in order to calm the conscience of pro-​slavery Europe, proclaimed in times past the dogma of the innate inferiority of Blacks; we appeal from this sentence to modern science, more impartial and better informed. For the rehearing of this great case, which will certainly excite all good men, I intend to appeal to the honesty of the most illustrious scholars. Each country will delegate one or several representatives in order to constitute this important tribunal. These highly qualified individuals, who will of course be joined by the most authoritative spokesmen of the slandered race, would assemble in a congress at the next universal exposition in Paris. There, all the arguments, old and new, which our detractors invoke for the support of their odious ethnological hierarchy, the perfect insanity of which, my eminent and dear compatriot, you have so definitively demonstrated, will be subjected to the close scrutiny of scientific discussion for the complete edification of the whole world. You are better placed than any other person to extract from this idea, a fruitful one in my opinion, whatever usefulness it contains for the work which we are engaged in. In requesting your evaluation and practical advice, I  am happy to avail myself of this opportunity of paying homage publicly to one of the men bringing the most honor to my race –​and I make bold to add, to humanity. Please accept the sincere expression of my respectful admiration and great affection. –​Benito Sylvain The author of The Equality of the Human Races replied by way of this letter: Paris, 3 January 1895 My dear compatriot, I received your letter yesterday’s date, and I  read it with great interest. The idea that you have put forward is assuredly an absolutely

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Anténor Firmin, Pan-Africanism  127 new and very beautiful one, namely that of convening a congress of scholars from different nations to examine, during the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, the very controversial and emotional question of the equality or inequality of human races. Thus, the twentieth century would open by shedding some light on a problem whose solution ought to influence powerfully the course of politics and philosophy. In fact, international relations between the civilized races and the backward races will take on a different character depending on whether one considers human races equal or not in their potential for moral and intellectual development. First of all, as we approach the end of this century European governments are all so pre-​occupied with transcontinental colonization that one can predict, without being a prophet, that the politics of the first half of the twentieth century at least, will be dominated by colonial questions, that is to say by the study of the best means to follow in the assimilation of distant colonies to their respective metropoles. It does not require much effort to prove the universal desire to know how to treat the people of different degrees of civilization who inhabit the colonized territories and without whom nothing worthwhile will ever be extracted from these areas. Furthermore, it is clear that the European mind will have broadened remarkably, enabling it to appreciate all the relevant historical, artistic and philosophical facts, if the day ever comes when scholars and thinkers desist from their stubborn adherence to the unenlightened doctrine of the natural inferiority of certain races as against certain others. From this broadening of the mind will come a thousand new aptitudes, but it is especially the sentiments of respect and solidarity which will have made significant progress, thereby opening up a larger more profound moral horizon for twentieth century man, whose evolution will leave our own civilization very far behind. So, you see how fruitful the realization of your project might be. Some might perhaps find in it too ambitious an initiative for Haiti; as for me, I approve of your idea without any reservation. It can only show to the world that Haitians, light skinned and Black, believe sincerely and seriously in the equality of races and in the consequences which flow from that fact. This would in turn increase respect for our race and provoke the admiration of all noble minds. I wish I  could add more practical suggestions to support my approval, but this would require more time and reflection. You have, moreover, five years ahead of you: this point could be dealt with later if need be. In the meantime, kindly believe, my dear compatriot, my sentiments of deep affection and my sincere regards. –​ A. Firmin

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128  Gershom Williams

Pan-​African Ideology Rooted in the Caribbean African-​ centered memories and cultural sensibilities (Africanisms) remained strong and vivid in the diasporan/​Caribbean islands primarily because this region is where the large majority of forcefully displaced African people were traumatically exiled into the Western Hemisphere during the (Maafa) Holocaust of Great Enslavement. Unlike the United States, in these geographical locations where large groups of enslaved and colonized Africans remained somewhat isolated and together, the environment became a natural incubator for cultural survival, cultural resistance and also cultural unity. When considering these opportune circumstances, it should not come as a huge surprise that the intellectual seeds for both Negritude and Pan-​Africanism would take root and germinate in the Caribbean Islands of Trinidad, Haiti, Martinique, Cuba and Jamaica. Regarding cultural autonomy, professor and sociologist E.  Franklin Frazier aptly points out that man’s first impulse in a new environment is to recreate his old environment and that this matter is always settled in terms of his cultural heritage. Thus, in the conflict posed between the African and the European in the Western environment, Africans have sought to recreate their cultural heritage, but as Frazier also suggests, the degree of recreation achieved has been determined by the opposing forces, acting from a superior position of power and generally demanding that the African conform to their ways and purposes (Walters 1993: 24). As one can easily deduce from perusing the letters of correspondence between Sylvain and Firmin in 1895, the initial idea and conceptualization for a Pan-​African convocation originated in the Caribbean diaspora involving two exiled Africans in Haiti and Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad. Perhaps a working definition of “Pan-​Africanism” should be shared at this time: “The idea that Africans and people of African descent in the new world should develop racial solidarity for the purpose of abolishing discrimination, enforced segregation, and political and economic exploitation of Negroes (Blacks) throughout the world” (Walters 1993: 43) Esteemed historian and master teacher Dr. John Henrik Clarke explains that “Pan-​Africanism began when the first European set foot on African soil and began the long pean of African resistance to oppression, or that the military nature of that resistance was ‘Pan-​African in character.’ ” (Walters 1993: 49). Distinguished history professor Douglas W. Leonard, in a recent essay titled “Writing against the Grain: Antenor Firmin and the Refutation of Nineteenth-​Century European Race Science,” writes the following commentary: Firmin’s views were anchored not only in the present but also in the rich legacy of Haitian intellectual history. At the same time, Firmin laid the foundation for the Negritude and Pan-​African movements to follow as evidenced by the homage paid him by Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah

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Anténor Firmin, Pan-Africanism  129 in a 1964 speech: ‘Let us not forget the important contributions of others in the new world for example, the sons of Africa in Haiti such as Anténor Firmin and Dr. Jean Price-​Mars’ ” (Radcliffe, Scott and Werner 2015: 28).

Haiti and Negritude After contemplative reflection, it should not surprise any serious student of Haitian historiography that some writers acknowledge Haiti as the home of both the Negritude and the Pan-​African ideological movement. Both were deliberate and concerted efforts by intellectuals and conscious activists to challenge and refute the international race propaganda regarding inherent Eurocentric worldviews of White superiority and cultural hegemony. In a highly illuminating essay titled “Haiti: The Land Where Negritude First Stood on Its Feet,” the highly prolific Nigerian author/​scholar Rose Ure Mezu examines two significant periods in Haitian aesthetic and literary history: Haiti’s pre-​ Negritude writings and its writers of the Negritude period. Dr. Mezu opens her essay with the following salutary comment to Haiti: Haiti occupies a singular position as the repository of authentic African values outside of Africa. Haiti served as the inspirational model for the inception of Negritude ideology. (Salt 2019: 3) Rose Mezu continues her elucidation of Haitian Negritude by sharing an instructional citation articulated by the Martinique anticolonial intellectual Aimé Césaire, from his Discourse on Colonialism: “I love Martinique, but it is an alienated land and while Haiti represented for me the heroic Antilles, in the African Antilles […] A country with a marvelous history: The first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-​ Jacques Dessalines, etc.” (Salt 2019: 3) In the following interview conducted in 1967 by Haitian poet René Depestre that appears at the close of his work Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire further expands his thinking on Haiti’s Negritude origins: R.D.  –​ In Return to My Native Land, you have stated that Haiti was the cradle of Negritude. In your words, “Haiti, where Negritude stood in its feet for the first time.” Then, in your opinion, the history of our country is in a certain sense the prehistory of Negritude. How have you applied the concept of Negritude to the history of Haiti? A.C.  –​Well, after my discovery of the North American Negro and my discovery of Africa, I went on to explore the totality of the Black World, and that is how I came upon the history of

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130  Gershom Williams Haiti […] Haiti is not very well known in Martinique. I am one of the few Martinicans who knows and loves Haiti. R.D.  –​Then for you the first independence struggle in Haiti was a confirmation of the concept of Negritude. Our national history is Negritude in action. A.C.  –​Yes, Negritude in action. Haiti is the country where Negro people stood up for the first time, affirming their determination to shape a new world, a free world. R.D. –​During all the nineteenth century there were men in Haiti who without using the term Negritude, understood the significance of Haiti for world history. Haitian authors, such as Hannibal Price and Louis-​Joseph Janvier, were already speaking of the need to reclaim Black cultural and aesthetic values. A genius like Antenor Firmin wrote in Paris, a book entitled The Equality of the Human Races, in which he tried to re-​evaluate African culture in Haiti in order to combat the total and colorless assimilation that was characteristic of our early authors. You could say that beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, some Haitian authors –​Justin Lherisson, Frederic Marcelin, Fernand Hibbert and Antoine Innocest began to discover the peculiarities of our country, the fact that we had an African past, that the slave (enslaved) was not born yesterday, that voodoo was an important element in the development of our national culture. (Césaire 2001: 79–​100)

Pan-​Africanism in the Black Atlantic I initially discovered the writings of Professor Jeff Karem, in July of 2016, after critically reviewing the volume titled Haiti and the Americas, edited by Carla Calargé, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-​ Gottberg and Clevis Headley. The latter volume, released in 2013, is a collection of essays presented at the “Haiti and the America’s: Histories, Cultures, Imaginations” conference held at Florida Atlantic University from October 21 to 23, 2010. Professor Karem’s essay contribution is titled “Haiti, Pan-​Africanism and Black Atlantic Resistance Writing.” Perhaps more than any other contemporary scholar to date, Professor Karem has critically examined and written quite extensively on the early Pan-​African activism of Anténor Firmin and fellow countryman Benito Sylvain. In his recently published text, The Purloined Islands: Caribbean–​U.S. Cross Currents in Literature and Culture 1880–​1959, Professor Karem offers the first book-​length exploration of the United States and Caribbean cultural and literary exchanges from the close of the Spanish-​American War to the Cuban Revolution. In the volume’s first chapter, “Birth of A  Hemisphere,” Karem sharply focuses on José Marti (from Cuba), Benito Sylvain and

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Anténor Firmin, Pan-Africanism  131 Anténor Firmin (from Haiti), and Henry Sylvester Williams and J.J. Thomas (from Trinidad), as foundational contributors to Pan-​Africanism and their unified sense of cultural resistance that would soon culminate in the New Negro Renaissance in Harlem, New York. A brief passage from Karem’s work will be shared at this juncture. Marti, Firmin and Sylvain in particular, established a critical discourse that examined both the local threat of U.S. dominion and the global implications of expanding Euro-​American power. I conclude the chapter with an examination of the first Pan-​African Conference, which inaugurated the discourse of Pan-​Africanism. Williams helped organize this event in 1900 and Caribbean intellectuals presented philosophical, cultural, and political arguments alongside a broad range of African and African-​American participants. W.E.B. Dubois was a key collaborator at the conference and I  argue that the presentations of West Indian intellectuals like Sylvain contributed key components to Dubois’s subsequent global anti-​imperialist vision, though he would ignore the role of this conference as he laid claim to the Pan-​African movement in the 1920’s. (Karem 2011: 11, 12) Professor Karem writes even more extensively on the “Conference of 1900” in a subsection of ­chapter 1 titled “Henry Sylvester Williams, W.E.B. Dubois and the Pan-​African Conference of 1900.” In Karem’s view, the position of Du Bois in the ideological origins of the Pan-​Africanism may be a bit overstated, while conversely, the seminal roles of several Caribbean intellectuals have been historically underrepresented. He writes, The case of Henry Sylvester Williams is particularly illustrative of the “purloined” gifts of the islands. Owen Mathurin has well illustrated Williams’ contributions to Pan-​Africanism in a biographical study, but subsequent critical understandings of the movement have still neglected Williams and the first Pan-​African Conference, which he organized. (Karem 2011: 33) Henry Sylvester Williams wrote to Benito Sylvain to organize the first conference in 1900, and we have already made mention of the letters of correspondence between Firmin and Sylvain as early as 1895. H.S. Williams also corresponded with and met Alexander Crummell, pastor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. and the first president of the American Negro Academy (1897); W.E.B. Du Bois attended the conference of 1900 at Crummell’s suggestion. In a recent Africology: The Journal of Pan-​ African Studies essay, contributing writer Celucien L. Joseph’s paper, which is titled “Antenor Firmin, the Egyptian Question, and the Afrocentric Imagination,” articulates the following sentiment:

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132  Gershom Williams Prominent African historian Theophile Obenga writes that Firmin was a lawyer by profession and a Pan-​ Africanist by political choice: Magloire-​Danton substantiates that claim by affirming that Firmin’s perspective methods encompass the three main elements of Pan-​ Africanist thought identified by Immanuel Geiss, which makes Firmin an early theoretician of the movement: the rejection of the postulate of race inequality reference to the history of ancient Africa as proof that Africans were capable of civilization, and examples of illustrious individuals of African descent in diverse fields. (Williams 2014: 123)

Pan-​Africanism and Race Vindication In 1857, the young Black intellectual Edward Wilmot Blyden published his first major textbook titled A Vindication of the African Race in which he conducted a rigorous examination that brilliantly challenged and refuted the Old Testament myth or Curse of Ham. That same year, Rev. James Theodore Holly (1829–​1911), promoted Black immigration to Haiti and made his emboldened arguments in a series of public lectures that were published in pamphlet form as Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self Government and Civilized Progress. “Race Vindication” has been and continues to be an extremely important intellectual and cultural component of Pan-​African thinkers at home and abroad. A  necessary and crucial arena of study for all vindicationist scholars from A. Firmin to C.A. Diop has been the cultural presence and contributions of Africans to Nile Valley/​classical Egyptian civilization. Ethiopia and Egypt on the continental Cradle-​land have long been cherished and viewed as advanced and powerful African civilizations, while in the diasporan world, post-​1804 Haiti held this same venerated stature in the struggle for self-​ reliance and self-​ determination, in the African world community. Race Vindicationist ideology has been advocated by poets, novelists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, musicians, theologians and Black Nationalists. In the United States, the political philosophy and movement of Pan-​ Africanism became necessary because the Founding Fathers failed to respect the humanity and morality of enslaved African persons, thereby creating and sustaining an anti-​democratic, tyrannical, culture of racial oppression and hegemony. This early political tyranny committed by the American government has been keenly observed and criticized by powerful voices, some of whom were Pan-​Africanists and vindicationists; David Walker, Frederick Douglas, Lydia Maria Child, Martin Delaney, Edward Blyden, Ida B.  Wells-​Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Melvile J.  Herskovits, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, Martin L.  King, Malcolm X Shabazz,

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Anténor Firmin, Pan-Africanism  133 Henry Sylvester Williams, Joseph Anténor Firmin, Benito Sylvain, Cheikh A. Diop, John Henrik Clarke, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and so on. Pan-​Africanism became an inevitable and indeed necessary response after the inception of transatlantic enslavement and subsequent global colonization of African peoples, lands, resources and cultural identities. The anachronistic pseudoscience of racial hierarchy at the dawn of the twenty first century continues to be an ideological roadblock facing African intellectuals both continental and diasporan. Anténor Firmin’s anti-​racist, anticolonial and Pan-​Africanist writings of over a century ago, if critically read and understood in the contemporary world of academia, would enable both students and research scholars to interpret and even build on his dynamic and therapeutic ideas to rehabilitate African and non-​African humanity. To summarize this chapter, we can list four essential thematic dates: 1885 –​Firmin publishes his masterful Pan-​African Treatise 1885 –​The European Scramble for Africa commences 1895 –​Firmin begins his letters of correspondence with Sylvain and Williams 1900 –​Firmin attends and participates in the inaugural Pan-​African Conference Before officially closing this chapter, I  would be remiss if I  did not take time to mention the winter 2014 special edition of Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, in which we celebrated the intellectual life and colossal legacy of Anténor Firmin. Although I, as guest editor, conscientiously listed Firmin as a Pan-​Africanist on the front cover, none of our contributing writers including myself, critically examined Firmin’s foundation role as a theoretician and activist in the late nineteenth-​ century movement. It is my deep and abiding hope that this chapter, at least in part, fulfills that unintended omission and properly restores Anténor Firmin to his well-​deserved and exalted position in the pantheon of Pan-​African pioneers.

Bibliography Calargé, Carla; Dalleo, Raphael; Gottberg, Luis Duno; Headley, Clevis, Editors, Haiti and the Americas. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson (2013) Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press, New  York (1972), (2000) Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, New Introduction “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” by Robin D.G. Kelley. Monthly Review Press, New York (2001), 79–​100 Firmin, Anténor. The Equality of the Human Races. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago (2002)

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134  Gershom Williams Karem, Jeff. The Purloined Islands: Caribbean–​U.S. Crosscurrents in Literature and Culture, 1880–​1959. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville (2011) Lobban-​Carolyn Fluehr. “Antenor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, Volume 102. Number 3 –​September 2000 Martin, Tony. The Pan-​African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond. The Majority Press, Wellesley, MA (1983) Mathurin, Owen Charles. Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-​ African Movement, 1869–​1911. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT (1976). Padmore, George. Pan Africanism or Communism. Doubleday, Garden City, NY (1971) Radcliffe, Kendahl; Scott, Jennifer; Werner, Anja, Editors, Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson (2015) Salt, Karen. The Unfinished Revolution Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-​Century Atlantic World. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool (2019), 20. Walters, Ronald W. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements. Wayne State University Press, Detroit (1993) Williams, Gershom. The Journal of Pan African Studies, Antenor Firmin: Great African Centered Thinker. Amber Books, Phoenix, AZ (2014)

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7  Lions and Sheep Anténor Firmin, Pan-​Africanism, and the Rebirth of Malcolm X Tammie Jenkins

For years, persons of African descent have engaged in intellectual, cultural, or political movements designed to create unity among this group. They began using their texts (visual, oral, and written) as vehicles for adding their voices to larger social issues such as colonialism, racial equality, and human rights. These unifying efforts have included the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movements, and Black Nationalism in the United States. However, scholars have only recently endeavored to trace the origins of the aforementioned movements to Pan-​Africanism or other efforts by diasporic Blacks to include their narratives and struggles in larger societal discourses. I learned of Pan-​Africanism while researching the work and contributions of Jean-​Price Mars to the Harlem Renaissance. In his texts, Price-​Mars paid homage to Anténor Firmin whom he credited as “the first black anthropologist” and acknowledged Firmin’s propagation of the notion that Black racial pride was connected to Africa and the reclamation of its history by continental Africans and their New World descendants.1 This idea was revolutionary and contributed to efforts by diasporic Black scholars and early political figures such as Marcus Garvey, Martin R. Delaney, Alexander Crummell, and Edward W. Blyden, to list but a few, to create businesses and introduce their ideas in hopes of empowering their Black brethren. Although prominent figures such as Anténor Firmin, Henry Sylvester Williams, and Benito Sylvan emerged as early leaders in the Pan-​African movement, it was grassroots participants like W.E.B. Du Bois and later, Malcolm X who integrated ideas of equality, human rights, and self-​ determinism into the forefront of African-​American political struggles in the United States. But, unlike his aforementioned counterparts, Firmin’s Pan-​ Africanist views systematically deconstructed racialized mythologies regarding Black inferiority while advocating the notion that there is equality among the human races. Firmin proposed Pan-​Africanism as a way to resist European colonization in Africa and to serve as a rallying cry for individuals of African descent to unify. Although Firmin’s text does not directly reference Pan-​ Africanism, he is still considered by scholars a Pan-​Africanist throughout the world. This chapter explores

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136  Tammie Jenkins the ways that Malcolm X’s post-​hajj beliefs paralleled those expounded by Anténor Firmin in The Equality of the Human Races. Drawing on public pedagogy as my conceptual framework, I explore the ways that Malcolm X exalted the philosophy embedded in Firmin’s notion of Pan-​Africanism. In addition, I  use narrative analysis as my qualitative research methodology to analyze, interpret, and articulate the underpinning concepts of Malcolm X’s post-​hajj views and later, rhetoric. Using narrative analysis enables me to excavate the ways in which Pan-​ Africanism created counternarratives that explained events, phenomena, or experiences through the actions or words of Malcolm X. Employing relevant excerpts and citations from speeches, interviews, and his autobiography, I consider how Malcolm X’s post-​hajj views aligned with those of Firmin. In this chapter, the following guiding questions are used: What is Pan-​Africanism? How do Malcolm X’s post-​hajj views parallel those of Anténor Firmin? In what ways are Malcolm X’s post-​hajj ideas comparable to Firmin’s? First, I describe Pan-​Africanism from the perspective of Anténor Firmin. Next, I discuss the similarities between Firmin’s and Malcolm X’s ideas. Finally, I explain how Malcolm X’s post-​hajj views correspond with those of Firmin.

Anténor Firmin and the Birth of Pan-​Africanism During a lecture, in 1897, Dr.  W.E.B. Du Bois used the term “Pan-​ Negroism” in his essay “The Conversation of Races” to articulate his belief that commonalities existed in the lived experiences of all persons of African descent regardless of their geographical locations. Early in the movement, Pan-​Negroism was a way of resisting and decentering European interpretations of African history and removing the continent’s social narratives from the record books. Although Du Bois has received acknowledgment for introducing Pan-​Negroism into the world’s lexicon, Edward W. Blyden has been credited by scholars as the individual who coined the term “Pan-​Africanism.” From the late twentieth century well into the present, Pan-​Africanism has served as an intellectual, philosophical, and political movement led first by diasporic Black people and currently by continental Africans. The latter urged diasporic Black people as well as those of other minority to unite based on a shared history, a continuous struggle for human rights, and a desire to overcome European subjectivity. For these proponents, Pan-​Africanism encouraged racial pride among persons of African descent through the reclamation of the African history from ancient Egypt and Ethiopia to the present. Examining the evolution of Pan-​Africanism from the late nineteenth century into the mid-​ twentieth century, George Shepperson found that this ideology reached its pinnacle in 1900, with the first congress. This initial conference led to the founding of the Pan-​African Association and four additional Pan-​ African conferences. Although men such as Marcus Garvey have been

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Lions and Sheep  137 connected with Pan-​Africanism, its true founder was Anténor Firmin, a Haitian intellectual, diplomat, lawyer, writer, teacher, and Egyptologist.2 Hailed as “the first black anthropologist,” Firmin used a revisionist perspective to deconstruct assertions made in Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.3 In this text, de Gobineau identified the Aryan race as superior to all other known races of the world, specifically those of African descent. Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races contended that every member of the human race was equal and that their similarities preceded all socially constructed attributes such as ethnicity or skin pigmentation. Believing that racial pride among diasporic Black people as well as that of continental Africans was connected to the decolonization of Africa, Firmin “[posited that] the Kemetic-​Egyptian civilizations of Africa was a Black civilization and that the Black race had made notable contributions to universal civilizations, which are often undermined in western scholarship.”4 This perspective enabled Firmin to not only pioneer the field of positivist anthropology, but also laid a foundation for the development of Pan-​Africanism in the United States and later, Africa in the mid-​twentieth century. Viewing race as a social construct, Firmin maintained that humankind was a melting pot in which “all men are man.”5 Such an assertion by Firmin decentered “the Eurocentric paradigm of his day by shifting the geography of reason and the discourse of civilization to the significance of ancient Egypt in the birth of the modern world.”6 Providing readers with an equalitarian view of race, Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races dispelled popular Eurocentric assumptions regarding the inferiority of persons of African descent.7 Hence, laying a foundation for noirisme movements such as Negritude and Black Nationalism in the Caribbean and the United States respectively, Firmin introduced the concept of Afrocentrism, which later evolved into the tenets of Pan-​Africanism. The history of Pan-​Africanism is attributable to a late eighteenth-​ and early nineteenth-​century literary and religious ideology known as Ethiopianism, a sociopolitical movement created by continental Africans and transported to the New World. Proponents of Ethiopianism contended that Africa possessed premier civilizations such as Kemet long before European settlers arrived in the region and connected African history to antiquity. This is similar to the assertion made by Anténor Firmin in The Equality of the Human Races as well as W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X. In the United States remnants of Ethiopianism exist in slave narratives, African-​ American folklore, and early Negro spirituals. Texts such as these were used by New World Africans and their descendants as sources of inspiration and empowerment with each generation endeavoring to make a return to their African homeland. Their efforts evolved into political, intellectual, and cultural movements like Black Nationalism and the Black Muslim Movement during the twentieth century. Beginning as a series of congresses hosted by the African Association, the first of these gathering was organized by Henry Sylvester Williams

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138  Tammie Jenkins and was held on July 23, 1900, in London’s Westminster Hall. Prior to the formal meeting, a preliminary conference was held in Chicago on August 14, 1893, and lasted for one week. Participants included Henry McNeal Turner, Alexander Crummell, the Egyptian Yakub Pasha, and Bishop Alexander Walters, each of whom expressed his ideas regarding the decolonization of Africa and ways to support its political and economic independence. Following this informal assembly, Henry Sylvester Williams laid the groundwork for the official summit in London in which European colonization in Africa was at the forefront. There were thirty-​ two participants from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States including Anténor Firmin and W.E.B. Du Bois, who drafted the general report and organized the second meeting in 1919. Over time, Pan Africanism evolved in the western hemisphere with New World Black people soliciting the government and establishing grassroots movements on behalf of Africa. This initiative served as “a movement of ideas” designed to create solidarity among diasporic Black people and their African brethren.8 Through the years, the term has been distorted or conflated as each succeeding generation of continental Africans and their diasporic brethren embark upon the task of creating a unified, self-​ defined identity. For the purposes of this chapter, I  employ Esedebe Olisanwuche’s description of Pan-​Africanism to show how Malcolm X’s post-​hajj beliefs are comparable to those exalted by Firmin years earlier. Olisanwuche stated that Pan-​Africanism is a political and cultural phenomenon which regards Africa, Africans and African descendants abroad as a unit. It seeks to regenerate and unify Africa and promote a feeling of oneness among the people of the African world. It glorifies the African past and inculcates pride in African values.9 This definition was chosen because Olisanwuche’s description captures both Firmin’s vision and Malcolm X’s post-​ hajj articulation of Pan-​ Africanism as a renaissance in blackness. Hence, shifting the focus from the politicization of Africa to human rights, both Firmin and Malcolm X maintained that racial pride was connected to the reclamation of Africa through a spiritual, mental, or physical journey. The interconnectivity between continental Africans and their diasporic brethren was stressed by Pan-​Africanists, who began establishing institutions such as societies, churches, and businesses as vehicles for liberating all persons of African descent and elevating their sociopolitical status. Primarily, Pan-​Africanism “was predicated on the use of Africa as a symbolic touchstone” and the exploration of the global treatment of Africans and their diasporic brethren with regards to colonialism and institutionalized racism.10 With origins in Ethiopianism, Pan-​Africanism in the twentieth century was modernized by the efforts of W.E.B. Du Bois

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Lions and Sheep  139 and later, Malcolm X. The concept of Pan-​Africanism was founded in the New World by diasporic scholars and intellectuals before spreading to continental African political figures and activists such as Haile Selassie and Kwame Nkrumah. An early form of Black Nationalism, Pan-​Africanism in the United States challenged colonialism and racism while promoting the establishment of an independent Africa.11 The goal was to reinstate the dignity of African people and their diasporic descendants, enhance race relations, advocate on behalf of Africa, improve the treatment of African blacks, and establish schools, industry, and businesses in Africa. By the mid-​twentieth century Pan-​Africanism had become a series of cultural movements in which political activism was identified as essential to the advancement of Black people universally as evidenced in the works of Anténor Firmin and later, Malcolm X.  It is these ideas that Firmin expounded in 1885 which Malcolm X mirrored post-​hajj as he embraced the equality that he experienced in Mecca and during his travels to Africa.

Malcolm X, Breaking Away, Going Home The man known the world over as Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little, on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Earl Little and Louise Norton Little.12 Malcolm’s mother, Louise, like his father, Earl, was a staunch supporter of Marcus Garvey. Prior to meeting Earl, Louise worked as a Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) secretary after migrating “to Canada in 1917” from Grenada.13 Earl was a lay Baptist preacher, carpenter, and UNIA organizer, who was brutally murdered in 1931.14 Both parents were Garveyites who endeavored to teach their children the significance of taking a stand while working toward the betterment of the Black race.15 Upon his father’s death and his mother’s bout with mental illness, the Littles’ children, including Malcolm, became wards of the state and were placed in different foster homes. It was during his time in foster care that Malcolm was visited by his half-​sister Ella Little, who invited him to visit and possibly live with her in Boston, an offer Malcolm X later accepted. During his teen years in Boston and then, Harlem, Malcolm engaged in criminal activities ranging from pimping, gambling, robbery, and other acts of hustling, which led to his incarceration on larceny charges in 1943.16 Malcolm was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison, but only served six and a half years of his sentence.17 While incarcerated Malcolm began rethinking his life choices and later viewed this time as an opportunity for his redemption and self-​education. This transition in his life signified the first of his many rebirths and marked the awakening of his dormant political activism. Malcolm studied Islam (under the late Elijah Muhammad) and upon his parole, in 1952, at age twenty-​seven, he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) and adopted the surname X.18 As a member of the NOI, Malcolm X delivered fiery speeches that were angry, personal, and racialized in ways that expressed the “black rage” that was

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140  Tammie Jenkins sweeping the United States. Studying the rhetoric of Malcolm X from his time as a NOI minister through his assassination in 1965, James Tyner described Malcolm X’s evolution in the context of geography, but not in the traditional sense. Instead, Tyner traced Malcolm X’s political stance from the avocation of separatism as a member of NOI to that of an independent thinker expounding ideologies anchored in Pan-​ Africanism. Tyner concluded that Malcolm X’s hajj to Mecca and subsequent visits to Africa provided him with an alternative interpretation regarding the struggles of oppressed people around the world. At the start of his public career, Malcolm X advocated the separatist beliefs of NOI and encouraged Black Americans to reject the language of their oppressors and create their own. Viewing the focus of the civil rights movement and the Black liberation movement as too narrow and colonized to effectively eradicate years of European control of diasporic Black people, Malcolm X exhibited a “new vision” for brotherhood, sisterhood, and connecting with Africa.19 Reevaluating the lived experiences of diasporic Black people globally, not just domestically, “Malcolm reframe[d]‌the terminological manipulation through a shift in [his personal and philosophical] circumferences,” calling for Black peoples’ political agency.20 Malcolm X relied on the power of words and associated meanings to stir his listeners or audiences to action.21 On April 13, 1964, Malcolm X left the United States for Mecca to attend his first hajj. Malcolm X remained in the region for five weeks, during which time he visited Africa where he met with leaders and delivered speeches. Upon his return to New  York, Malcolm X began expounding Pan-​ Africanist messages similar to those of Anténor Firmin in which human rights and equality were essential components. Post-​ hajj Malcolm X reflected Firmin’s ideas by encouraging racial unity among diasporic Black people and oppressed people of color worldwide. Employing Firmin’s notion that “human beings everywhere are endowed with the same qualities and defects without distinctions based on color or anatomical shape,” Malcolm X embraced the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood across color lines and religious affiliations, which he accentuated at a press conference on May 21, 1964, following his return from Mecca.22 An unnamed reporter stated, “Malcolm, have your experiences with white skinned Muslims in Africa and the Middle East made you feel that relations between Negros and Whites who are not Muslim is anymore possible?” To which Malcolm X responded, When I  was on the pilgrimage I  had close contact with Muslims whose skin within America be classified as white, and with Muslims who are themselves would be classified as white in America but these particular Muslims didn’t call themselves white. They looked upon themselves as human beings, as part of the human family and therefore looked upon all other segments of the human family as part of the same family.23

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Lions and Sheep  141 This passage demonstrates the effect that Firmin’s ideas had on the Malcolm X post-​hajj worldview. Where Firmin states, “human beings are endowed with the same qualities,” Malcolm X expands these words to include his experiences in Mecca with Muslims who “looked upon themselves as human beings” and one another as “family.”24 Malcolm X, like Firmin, suggested that human beings are interconnected regardless of their physical appearance. It is ideas such as this that transformed Malcolm from an NOI separatist proponent to a human rights activist. Although credit for Malcolm X’s Pan-​Africanist views has been given to his parents, Earl and Louise, based on their affiliation with Marcus Garvey and UNIA, the seeds of Malcolm X’s post-​hajj position are akin to those articulated by Firmin. Similar to Firmin, Malcolm X’s rhetoric and oration were essential to audiences understanding his newfound human rights activist perspective. Malcolm X’s conversion to orthodox Islam signified one way that he began exploring the creation of true brotherhood and sisterhood with oppressed individuals from around the world, which are tenets affiliated with Firmin’s Pan-​Africanist philosophy.25 The realization of the likeness between of Firmin’s ideas and Malcolm X post-​hajj dogmas are presented in his human rights advocacy, vocal intonations, and new political attitude. Initially, Malcolm X exhibited an aggressive articulation of Pan-​Africanism, which was a reflection of one of the goals of NOI; however, during his hajj and subsequent visit to various parts of Africa, Malcolm X witnessed people of different races, all Muslims, interacting with one another as equal human beings. Malcolm X also engaged in conversations with Kwame Nkrumah, who by that time had taken an active role in advocating Pan-​Africanism with his African brethren. These conversations, in addition to Malcolm X’s witnessing racial harmony, provided him an understanding of Pan-​Africanism as a way to advocate human rights and promote solidarity between continental Africans and their diasporic brethren.

(Un)learning the Past, Acquiring Knowledge, Sharing New Views Firmin’s ideas were marginalized in European academic circles, yet remnants survived and were propelled to the forefront by Black intellectuals, scholars, and laypersons who attended the 1900 congress such as W.E.B. Du Bois. These beliefs were also transported by Firmin to Haiti as his notions of Pan-​Africanism were adopted by the Caribbean Confederation Project and radicalized by Marcus Garvey in the United States. Although Malcolm X received no formal indoctrination into Firmin’s Pan-​Africanist philosophy, he did obtain a rudimentary introduction to Pan-​Africanism during his formative years from his parents, Earl and Louise. The tenets that the Littles provided Malcolm and his siblings served as foundational pillars for their NOI separatist doctrine. However, Malcolm X’s departure from NOI, after twelve years, enabled

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142  Tammie Jenkins to him to question the teachings of the organization and to think for himself. Malcolm X deconstructed all of the views he had expressed as a NOI minister and sought ways to empower the Black community while working toward human rights for all. During interviews after his travels to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and Africa, Malcolm X acknowledged his hajj as a turning point in his spiritual and sociopolitical thinking. Citing the social interactions that he witnessed between not only Muslims of various races in Mecca, but also his meetings and talks with political figures in the region, Malcolm X reiterated Firmin’s notion that all men are equal. On a personal level, the hajj marked a transformation in Malcolm X’s ideologies enhanced by his conversations and interactions with Muslims of all nationalities as well as his visits to various African countries. Malcolm X credits these visits with “greatly inform[ing] his late Pan-​Africanist sentiments.”26 Upon his return to the United States, Malcolm X challenged negative depictions of Black people worldwide. Malcolm X’s post-​hajj thinking reflected his newly acquired spatial relationships with Muslims of all nationalities and increased his understanding of diasporic Black people as descendants of Africans past and present. Before his assassination, Malcolm X became an advocate for human rights, hence creating a political framework that aligned with the ideologies expressed by Anténor Firmin in The Equality of the Human Races. Following his hajj, Malcolm X became known in his personal life as well as in the Muslim world as El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, a variation of the name Malik Shabazz, which he adopted after leaving NOI.27 Malcolm X began delivering speeches and engaging in interviews that provided listeners or audiences with narratives of unity among diasporic Black people while stressing the significance of positive global representations of Africa and Africans. Investigating Malcolm X’s public speeches as symbolic representations of his deepened philosophical views post-​hajj, Robert E. Terrill discovered that Malcolm X used his forums to promote liberatory praxis through transgressive resistance. The hajj was Malcolm X’s moment of “personal transformation” and his philosophical evolution regarding race relations and brotherhood as evidenced in his interview with the Village Voice on February 25, 1965. During this interview Malcolm X stated, I haven’t changed. I  just see things on a broader scale. […] If you attack [the White man] because he is white, you give him no out. He can’t stop being white. We’ve got to give the white man a chance. He probably won’ take it, the snake. But we’ve got give him a chance.28 Malcolm X reiterated his previous articulation in a television interview with Pierre Berton on January 19, 1965, in which he expressed his belief “in a society in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality.”29 These views were enhanced by Malcolm X’s anti-​racist

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Lions and Sheep  143 ideology and abandonment of his previous separatist NOI rhetoric, which were replaced by notions of universal brotherhood and sisterhood. By this time, Malcolm X had determined that his life work was to improve the life of Black Americans and persons of color around the world, and he began establishing organizations and holding rallies to connect these groups to Africa, to one another, and to their interconnected struggle for equality. Returning to Firmin’s assertion that “all men are men,” Malcolm X embraced human rights activism while locating the struggles of Black Americans in these narratives.30 Malcolm X stated that I would tell Americans the observation; that where true brotherhood existed among all colors, where no one felt segregated, where there was no “superiority” complex, no “inferiority” complex—​then voluntarily, naturally, people the same kind felt drawn together by that which they had in common.31 Expressing his belief in commonalities of lived experiences among persons of African descent, Malcolm began encouraging interracial fellowship with the words “where true brotherhood and sisterhood existed among all colors.”32 Malcolm X put this notion into practice by allowing non-​ Black individuals to attend his rallies and other meetings. Utilizing counternarratives regarding brotherhood and equality, Malcolm X used his public forums to intentionally present a “positive and affirming Black American identity” while propelling his post-​hajj views to the forefront of these discourses.33 As a result, Malcolm X employed rhetoric that provided social commentary and encouraged his audiences to actively participate in deconstructing “the shackles of mental colonialism.”34 Malcolm X’s post-​hajj thinking restructured perceptions of knowledge and reflected his newly acquired spiritual beliefs. Malcolm X used situated knowledge, observations, and his personal experiences to inform his worldview. Following his hajj and informal introduction to Pan-​Africanist views, Malcolm X realized that his departure from NOI enabled him “to better comprehend, contextualize, and formulate his ideas.”35 Malcolm X used this time to advocate human rights through acts of self-​ determinism while mirroring Firmin’s idea that there is equality among members of the human races. In his final days, Malcolm viewed the geography of the United States as a mental space, not just a physical location in which the struggles of “Afro-​Americans” were “interlocked” with that of other people of color worldwide.36

Conclusion At the height of scientific racism, Anténor Firmin dared to challenge the status quo. Firmin used his words to question the systematic

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144  Tammie Jenkins categorization of non-​Aryan individuals as “inferior” to their European (Aryan) counterparts. Firmin’s critique in The Equality of the Human Races endeavored to reconcile years of socially constructed history in which persons of African descent were merely footnotes. Instead, Firmin traced the African presence in pharaoic civilizations in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia by presenting artifacts such as the pyramids and hieroglyphics as data supporting the contributions of Africa and its early inhabitants to the history of the world. The ways that Firmin connected Africa to other societies in the world laid a foundation for Pan-​Africanism, which encouraged racial pride among persons of African descent in the diaspora and on the continent. The early work of Anténor Firmin would later serve a group of Black intellectuals, scholars, and grassroots motivators such as Malcolm X who employed Firmin’s Pan-​Africanist ideas to propel narratives for racial unity and human rights for all people into larger social discourses. This chapter examined how Malcolm X’s post-​hajj philosophies resembled those expounded by Anténor Firmin in The Equality of the Human Races. Driven by the notion of true brotherhood and sisterhood, Malcolm X embraced human rights as the cornerstone for lifting the Black race and for freeing oppressed persons of color worldwide. As a member of the NOI, Malcolm X advocated the doctrine of separatism and spewed racialized generalizations that dehumanized White people but did little to elevate Black people. Following his hajj to Mecca, Malcolm X shared with audiences via interviews with the media and other public forums his newfound appreciation for the struggles of not only Black Americans but also other marginalized groups. This shifting focus provided Malcolm X with an opportunity to resituate the lived experiences of Black people and people of color globally as a world problem rooted in institutionalized racism. Sadly, Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, in the Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom as he prepared to deliver a speech to over one hundred attendees and his family. Malcolm X died having only begun to realize his vision for the future of African Americans and other oppressed persons of color.

Notes 1 Carolyn Fluehr-​ Lobban, “Antenor Firmin and Haiti’s Contribution to Anthropology,” Ghadhiva 1 (May 2005): 1. 2 Fluehr-​Lobban, “Antenor Firmin and Haiti’s Contribution,” 1. 3 Celucien Joseph, “Antenor Firmin, the ‘Egyptian Question,’ and Afrocentric Imagination,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 3. 4 Joseph, “Egyptian Question,” 79. 5 Antenor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, Translated by Asselin Charles. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000): 451. 6 Joseph, “Egyptian Question,” 93. 7 Fluehr-​Lobban, “Antenor Firmin and the Limits,” 9. 8 James Tyner, The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and the Remaking of African Space (New York: Routledge, 2006): 109.

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Lions and Sheep  145 9 Esedebe Olinsanwuche, Pan Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–​ 1963, (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982): 2. 10 Tyner, Geography, 116. 11 George Shepperson, “Pan-​Africanism and ‘Pan-​Africanism’: Some Historical Notes,” Phylon 23, no. 4 (December 1962): 346. 12 Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, “Malcolm X and the Limits of the Rhetoric of Revolutionary Dissent,” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 3 (March 1993): 293; Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965): 1. 13 Condit and Lucaites, “Malcolm X,” 293; Tyner, Geography, 19. 14 John Barresi, “The Identities of Malcolm X.” In Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narratives, edited by Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich, (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2006): 206. 15 Barresi, “The Identities of Malcolm X,” 209. 16 Barresi, “The Identities of Malcolm X,” 210. 17 John Henrik Clarke, “The New Afro-​American Nationalism,” Freedomway 1, no. 3 (Fall 1961): 288; Tyner, Geography, 27. 18 Tyner, Geography, 52. 19 Condit and Lucaites, “Malcolm X and the Limits,” 293. 20 Condit and Lucaites, “Malcolm X and the Limits,” 302. 21 Robert E. Terrill, “Colonizing the Borderlands: Shifting Circumference in the Rhetoric of Malcolm X,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 1 (February 2000): 2. 22 Antenor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 450. 23 Malcolm X, “Return from Mecca Interview, May 21, 1964,” www. malcolmxmovie.com. 24 Malcolm X, “Return from Mecca Interview, May 21, 1964.” 25 Pierre Tristam, “Malcolm X in Mecca: When Malcolm Embraced True Islam and Abandoned Racial Separatism.” ThoughtCo. www.thoughtco.com/​ malcolm-​x-​in-​mecca-​2353496 (accessed October 21, 2018). 26 Tyner, Geography, 31. 27 Tyner, Geography, 33. 28 Malcolm X, “After the Bombing, 14 February 1965.” In Malcolm X Speaks, edited by George Breitman, (New York: Grove Press, 1966): 213. 29 Malcolm X, “After the Bombing,” 197. 30 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 350. 31 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 350. 32 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 350. 33 Condits and Lucaites, “Malcolm X and the Limits,” 296. 34 Malcolm X, “Return from Mecca Interview,” www.malcolmxmovie.com. 35 Tyner, Geography, 16. 36 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 360.

Bibliography Barresi, John. “The Identities of Malcolm X.” In Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narratives, edited by Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich, 201–​222. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2006.

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146  Tammie Jenkins Bernasconi, Robert. “A Haitian in Paris: Antenor Firmin as a Philosopher Against Racism.” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 4/​5 (2008); 365–​383. Charles, Asselin. “Race and Geopolitics in the Work of Antenor Firmin.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 68–​88. Clarke, John Henrik. “The New Afro-​American Nationalism.” Freedomway 1, no. 3 (Fall 1961): 285–​295. Condit, Celeste Michelle and John Louis Lucaites. “Malcolm X and the Limits of the Rhetoric of Revolutionary Dissent.” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 3 (March 1993): 291–​313. Firmin, Anténor. The Equality of the Human Races. Trans. Asselin Charles. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Fluehr-​ Lobban, Carolyn. “Antenor Firmin and Haiti’s Contribution to Anthropology.” Gradhiva 1 (May 2005): 1–​20. Joseph, Celucien. “Anténor Firmin, the ‘Egyptian Question,’ and Afrocentric Imagination.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 127–​176. Leigh, David J. “Malcolm X and the Black Muslim Search for Ultimate Reality.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 33–​49. Malcolm X. “After the Bombing, 14 February 1965.” In Malcolm X Speaks, edited by George Breitman, 157–​177. New York: Grove Press, 1966. Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley. New York: Ballantine Books, 1965. (Reprint 2015). Obenga, Theophile. “Homage a Antenor Firmin (1850–​ 1911), Haitian Egyptologist.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 108–​126. Olinsanwuche, Esedebe. Pan-​Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–​1963. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982. Painter, Nell Irvin. “Malcolm X across the Genres.” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1998): 432–​439. Shepperson, George. “Pan-​ Africanism and ‘Pan-​ Africanism’: Some Historical Notes.” Phylon (1960) 23, no. 4 (December 1962): 346–​358. Sherwood, Marika. “Pan-​ African Conferences, 1900–​ 1953: What Did ‘Pan-​ Africanism’ Mean?” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 10 (January 2012): 106–​112. Terrill, Robert E. “Colonizing the Borderlands: Shifting Circumference in the Rhetoric of Malcolm X.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 1 (February 2000):  67–​85. Tristam, Pierre. “Malcolm X in Mecca: When Malcolm Embraced True Islam and Abandoned Racial Separatism.” ThoughtCo. www.thoughtco.com/​malcom-​x-​ in-​mecca-​2353496 (accessed October 21, 2018). Tyner, James, The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and the Remaking of African Space. New York: Routledge, 2006. Warren, Nagueyalti. “Pan-​ Africanism Cultural Movements: From Baraka to Karenga.” Journal of Negro History 75, no. 1/​2 (Winter/​Spring 1990): 16–​28. Williams, Gershom. “Deconstructing Pseudo-​Scientific Anthropology: Antenor Firmin and the Reconceptualization of African Humanity.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 9–​31.

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8  At the Center of World History, before Diop, There Was Firmin Great Scholars on the Black African Origin of the Ancient Egyptians and Their Civilization Patrick Delices

Introduction Unequivocally, Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin, along with Cheikh Anta Diop, has had the greatest scholarly impact on Egyptology as it pertains to substantiating the thesis of a Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization. By rendering invalid the supposition of a white origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization, Firmin and Diop placed not only Africa but also Black Africans at the center of world history. In that regard, and in terms of Egyptology and the field of anthropology, Firmin is considered a pioneer, the Black Father, while Diop is known as the Pharaoh of Knowledge and is often considered the Father of Afrocentrism. Although Diop is often considered the Father of Afrocentrism, the analytical framework regarding Afrocentrism predates him, as illustrated in the scholarly works of numerous nineteenth-​century Black scholars, such as Firmin. Firmin, who was born in Cap-​Haïtien, Haiti, on October 18, 1850, is also known as one of the fathers of Pan-​Africanism and Pan-​Americanism/​ Caribbeanism even though an argument can be made that both political ideologies predated him. However, twelve years after Firmin’s death and by the time the Third Pan-​African Congress convened at London and Lisbon in 1923, one of Africa’s greatest sons, Cheikh Anta Diop, was born in Senegal on December 29, 1923. Both Firmin and Diop transitioned to the ancestral realm in their sixties. Firmin, made his transition on September 19, 1911, a month shy of his sixty-​first birthday and Diop made his transition on February 7, 1986, at the age of sixty-​two. Whereas Firmin came from a humble beginning and an intellectual Maroon tradition while being educated in Haiti at the Lycée National du Cap-​ Haitien and the Lycée Pétion, Diop came from an exclusive aristocratic Muslim family, the Lebu and Mouride brotherhood, as he was educated in his hometown in the Diourbel Region of Thieytou in a traditional Islamic educational institution. Diop was also educated in

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148  Patrick Delices Paris, France, at the Sorbonne, where he earned his Doctor of Letters. Unlike Diop, Firmin never earned a PhD, but he did obtain a law degree. Perhaps, Firmin lacking a doctoral degree could have been attributed to racism or to his own satisfaction with earning a terminal professional degree in law. However, similar to Diop, Firmin as a diplomat in France completed numerous courses at the Sorbonne and was extremely well versed in numerous academic disciplines to the point that several doctoral degrees should have been granted to him. Firmin’s intellectual predisposition came from the Haitian Maroons and revolutionaries who fought victoriously in the Haitian Revolution and made Haiti the first Black sovereign nation in the Americas by 1804. Diop’s intellectualism was also shaped by events in 1804 when a charismatic African Islamic scholar by the name of Shaihu Usman dan Fodio in his jihads established an oligarchic (Islamic) republic known as the Sokoto Caliphate throughout most of West Africa including Senegal –​ultimately giving rise to the Mouride brotherhood. The Mouride brotherhood was founded in 1883 in Senegal by the “Servant of the Messenger,” Khādimu ‘al-​Rasūl (Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke). Whereas one revolution and intellectual tradition abolished chattel slavery, colonialism, and imperialism under the premise of a Black deity called Ogun, the God of War and Warriors; the other revolution and intellectual tradition tried to gain control of the slave trade and slavery from the Europeans in the name of Allah. However, both revolutions and/​or holy wars established Black authoritative rule in their states –​one by way of vodou and Congo-​style Catholicism, the other by way of African Islam. Diop was a practicing Muslim, whereas Firm embraced Catholicism while denouncing vodou. Despite their varying pivotal intellectual, religious, and revolutionary trajectories, both Firmin and Diop were very well-​educated and political engaged scholars. Both men had political (presidential) ambitions. Firmin was a member of the provisional Government of the Republic of Haiti. Firmin was also minister of foreign affairs, agriculture and worship and minister of finance, commerce and foreign affairs in Haiti. Furthermore, Firmin founded a political journal known as Le Messager du Nord. In 1902, Firmin unsuccessfully ran for the presidency of Haiti against Pierre Nord Alexis, who was the son of King Henry Christophe’s daughter, Blézine Georges. Nord Alexis ultimately became president of Haiti at the age of eighty-​two. From 1950 to 1953, Diop served as the general secretary of the Reassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an African democratic nationalist political party founded by President Félix Houphouët-​Boigny, the first president of the Ivory Coast. As an anticolonial Pan-​African organization, the RDA was one of the largest political parties in West Africa that called for Africa’s independence during the colonial period. In the 1960s, Diop formed Le Bloc des Masses Sénégalaises (BMS) and the Front National Sénégalais (FNS) as he called for a federation and unification of African states. Diop also advocated for the restoration of

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At the Center of World History  149 a collective African consciousness and personality. For Diop, the restoration of a collective African consciousness and personality along with the federation and unification of Africa could only be successfully employed by recognizing ancient Egypt as Black African civilization while linking it to the rest of Black Africa by way of three key scientific factors: historical, linguistic, and psychic. Due to his political activism and scientific analysis, Diop would ultimately be arrested and nearly killed under President Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal and a founding member of the Negritude movement along with cofounders Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas. However, in 1966 at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, President Leopold Senghor announced publicly and officially that Jean Price-​Mars was indeed “The Father of Negritude,” while Césaire had always maintained that the spark for the Negritude movement first ignited in Haiti.1 Interestingly, a decade before the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senghor, Césaire, Diop, and Price-​Mars met and presented at the First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, which was held in Paris at the Sorbonne from September 19 to 22,.1956. Jean Price-​ Mars was a scholarly disciple of Firmin and an early intellectual mentor to Senghor and Diop. The theoretical framework concerning the three scientific pillars of establishing a collective African consciousness and identity was an invaluable addendum to Price-​Mars’s thesis regarding a collective African identity. The First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists would prove to be a major turning point in Diop’s life as it ultimately exposed the world to the scholarly prowess of Diop and propelled his career as perhaps the best-​ known Black public intellectual and Afrocentric scholar at the center of world history regarding a Black African origin of world civilizations, especially the civilization of ancient Egypt. In many ways that relate to the research study of ancient Egypt, Diop was extremely gifted, but so was Firmin. Both Firmin and Diop were fluent in French and many other languages. Firmin was fluent in Haitian Creole, Latin, Greek, the Meroitic script, and Medu Neter, the ancient writing system of the Nile Valley civilization. Diop was fluent in Wolof, Latin, Greek, the Meroitic script, and Medu Neter. They were both Egyptologists and anthropologists, and some will conclude, and others will debate about whether they were both Afrocentric scholars. However, most people will conclude and agree that as public intellectuals and scholars, Firmin and Diop were both engaged in the vindicationist intellectual tradition of Black scholars. As public intellectuals and scholars, Firmin and Diop successfully challenged and invalidated the racist notion that the ancient Egyptians and their civilization were white not Black. The results of their scholarly research vindicated the fact that Africans/​Blacks are not inferior and are indeed the originators of not only world civilizations, but also humanity.

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150  Patrick Delices However, in the scholarly world of Egyptology and Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity, it is the name as well as the scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop not Joseph Anténor Firmin that evokes racial pride and historical vindication in debunking Eurocentrism and white supremacist intellectual dogma by substantiating the claim that the ancient Egyptians along with their great civilization were Black, not white. Yet, the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their spectacular civilization was first advanced by Firmin, not Diop. Still, within the public intellectual realm of African-​centered scholarship and Egyptology, it is the name of Cheikh Anta Diop, along with his scholarship, that is popularized and better known than the name and scholarship of Joseph Anténor Firmin, but why? To answer that particular question, this chapter will group Black scholars into intellectual traditions while exploring and analyzing comparatively the scholarly works and intellectual contributions of Joseph Anténor Firmin and Cheikh Anta Diop specifically pertaining to the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization.

Before Firmin: Egyptology, the Haitian Revolution, and the Vindicationist Tradition at the Center of World History In what is termed the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment, Western Europe’s full-​frontal acknowledgment and pursuit of Egyptology started during the French war campaign against Egypt from 1798 to 1801 under Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s war on the Nile Valley coincided with his war on Haiti, as illustrated in the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution was only unthinkable to France and other colonial nations whose leadership and society determined that Blacks were too inferior to defeat superior whites in the art and science of war. For enslaved African captives in Haiti, defeating European enslavers and their colonial nations in war was not only thinkable but also winnable given their understanding of themselves as not inferior and the Europeans as not superior. For enslaved African captives in Haiti, they knew that they were not inferior because there is nothing inferior about a god who is made out of the image of man/​woman. There is a popular religious precept that states that man is made out of the image of god. And for centuries, Africans worldwide have been enslaved and colonized to believe that the image of god is that of the white man. However, that particular Eurocentric non-​universal precept was shattered on the night of August 14, 1791, at Bwa Kayiman in Haiti when Mambo Cécile Fatiman sacrificed a Black pig to the loa Erzulie Dantó, as Houngan Boukman Dutty told the gathering troops to abandon the image of the white man as god and god as the white man, for god is within you and is made out of your image not the image of your enslavers and colonizers. As he concluded his declaration of war (some would say prayer), Boukman told the enslaved African warriors that the god within

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At the Center of World History  151 them wanted them to avenge the wrongs and horrific crimes that were committed by whites. The god within those enslaved African warriors that night was the God of War, Ogu, and for Boukman Dutty and Cécile Fatiman, to know yourself is to know the god within you. This particular philosophical understanding of self or knowledge of self (“know thyself”) is key as it is an ancient Egyptian aphorism, which was later “adopted” by Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, and many others. At Ipet Resyt (the Southern Sanctuary), better known as the Temple of Luxor, one will find the axiom, “Man, Know Thyself and You Are Going to Know the Gods.” Thus, to know who you are is to know god because god, as Boukman reminded us in 1791, is within you and there is nothing inferior about that. The enslaved African captives in Haiti and throughout the Americas understood that particular revolutionary ontology. Black public intellectual Gershom Williams confirms the previous statement above by affirming the following point: Indeed, African-​American, Haitian, Jamaican and other disaporan writers have vigorously challenged the charges and claims of their biological and intellectual inferiority. They have published extensive anti-​racist literature which sought to combat and defeat racist assaults on their humanity and intelligence […] This vindicationist intellectual tradition as it is viewed by some scholars continues in the nineteenth century.2 As an addendum to the above statement by Williams, prior to Firmin, but also ignored and made invisible, are the scholarly contributions of early nineteenth-​century Black Egyptologists John H.  Johnson and Norbert Rilleux, who also engaged in the vindicationist tradition of Black public intellectuals. Since the 1840s, John H. Johnson had become one of the first Black scholars to argue scientifically, not biblically, that the ancient Egyptians were Black Africans and the originators of the arts and sciences, as demonstrated in his powerful monograph Arguments and Observations of the Ethiopians of African Race, which effectively confronted and rendered invalid Samuel Morton’s supposition that the ancient Egyptians and their civilization were Asiatic in origin and racially white.3 Born in New Orleans in 1806, two years after Haiti declared its independence and the year of the assassination of Haiti’s liberator, Janjak Desalin, Norbert Rilleux was not only an Egyptologist, but he was also a chemical engineer and inventor whose progenitors might have migrated to Louisiana from Haiti during the Haitian Revolution. Rilleux is known as the inventor who fostered the growth of the sugar industry and revolutionized the sugar processing system by inventing the multiple-​effect evaporator. However, the work of Rilleux as a chemical engineer is obscure along with his scholarship as an Egyptologist given

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152  Patrick Delices his collaboration with one of the founding figures of modern Egyptology, Jean-​ François Champollion, and his scholarly work deciphering the hieroglyphics at the national library of France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France located in Paris.4 In regard to the obscurity of Norbert Rilleux and his work, Black public intellectual James G.  Spady expresses the following sentiment: Although a number of his technical papers and monographs are still extant in French, ninety years have passed since his death and we have no solid biographical study of this outstanding scientist. Yet, George Washington Carver is still believed to be the greatest Negro scientist of all times.5 Moreover, prior to Firmin, a Haitian revolutionary vindicationist and erudite scholar named Baron Pompee de Vastey, wrote about the African origin of civilizations and placed Africa and Africans at the center of world history. De Vastey stated: The enemies of Africa wish to persuade the world that for five out of the six thousand years the world has existed, Africa has long been sunk in barbarism. Have they forgotten that Africa was the cradle of the Arts and Sciences? If they pretend to forget this, it becomes our duty to remind them of it.6 Interestingly, the second cousin of De Vastey is the great novelist Alexandre Dumas, who is best known for the novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. De Vastey was also a former slave who fought in the Haitian Revolution under General Toussaint L’Ouverture and later became the secretary of King Henri Christophe of Haiti. Thus, the Haitian Revolution represented not only war on the battlefield, but also war of the intellect, as illustrated in Haiti’s Pioneer School of Thought along with the vindicationist tradition of Black public intellectuals where both the sword and the script were used as powerful weapons to pierce the heart and the mind. However, the concept of the Black man or woman as god was simply overbearing to a supercilious white society as Napoleon attempted to conquer Egypt and reinstitute chattel slavery in Haiti. During Napoleon’s attempted colonial subjugation of the Nile Valley and Haiti by brute military force, the Rosetta Stone was “discovered” in 1799 by French soldiers who were constructing a fort at a bijou settlement in Egypt known as Rashid (Rosetta), hence, spearheading Egyptology as an academic field and arousing the interest of Europe and the United States in ancient Egypt in what is termed “Egyptomania.” As a consequence of the ongoing revolution in Haiti along with the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon not only withdrew from Egypt and Syria, but he ultimately abandoned his dream of an American Empire with

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At the Center of World History  153 the sale of his colonial territories in Louisiana to the United States. The Louisiana Purchase would ultimately double the size of the United States as it also augmented its wealth and political influence throughout the world. With the conclusion of the Haitian Revolution, Haiti became the first Black independent republic in the Americas, and African-​Haitians became the first group of people to simultaneously defeat and abolish colonialism and chattel slavery not only in the Americas but worldwide. With the defeat of Western Empire via colonialism and chattel slavery, African-​Haitians in their vindicationist intellectual tradition put a stamp on the nonsensical notion of Black inferiority and white superiority in spite of Europeans’ incessant intellectual quest to falsely claim Egyptians as whites and ancient Egypt as a white civilization. Thought-​provoking though is the fact that the vindicationist intellectual tradition is not the only categorization or grouping of Black scholars and public intellectuals; however, it is the only Black intellectual tradition in which Firmin was mentioned, categorized, and grouped.

Before Diop, There Was Firmin: The Grouping of Great Black Scholars at the Center of World History In March 1979, the Kemetic Institute of Chicago hosted its First Symposium at the Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Presiding over this symposium was Mzee Jedi Shemsu Jehewty, better known as Dr.  Jacob Carruthers Jr., who in 1978 cofounded the Kemetic Institute along with A.  Josef Ben Levi, Anderson Thompson, and Conrad Worrill. Five years after this symposium and two years prior to the death of Cheikh Anta Diop, in 1984 at the First Annual Ancient Egyptian Studies Conference in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Carruthers, along with Drs. John Henrik Clark, Yosef ben-​Jochannan, Asa Hilliard, Maulana Karenga, and Leonard Jeffries Jr., established the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), of which Carruthers was elected its first president. That same year, in 1984, Carruthers published his lectures from that particular symposium in a seminal book titled Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies. In Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies, Carruthers identified and labeled Hosea Easton, Henry Highland Garnett, and Martin Robison Delaney as “the old scrappers who without any special (academic) training, analyzed the biblical myth of Ham and used it, along with the works of Herodotus and Diodorus, to establish Blacks as the authors of the great ‘Nile Valley’ civilizations.”7 For Carruthers, the next group to emerge after “the old scrappers” to engage in ancient Egyptian scholarship would be George Washington Williams and W.E.B. Du Bois who “started a strain of integrationist thought on ancient Kemet” as “they argued only that Blacks had a share in building the Egyptian civilization along with other races.”8 Carruthers further states that

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154  Patrick Delices this strain which is completely enthralled to European historiography is continued today by such Blacks as John Hope Franklin, Anthony Norguera and Ali Mazuri, some of these also demanded a Black share in Greek antiquity, which properly understood is true, but for the most part these “Negro intellectuals” have no grasp of the true meaning.9 According to Carruthers, the third group to engage in the production of knowledge about ancient Egypt would be known as the progressive extension of “the old scrappers.” For Carruthers, these scholars, such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Theophile Obenga, and perhaps the most celebrated U.S.-​based African-​centered Egyptologist, the legendary Dr. Yosef ben Jochannan, utilized a multidisciplinary research methodology in building an African historiography while producing knowledge connecting ancient Egypt with Black Africa. As an addendum, Drs. Leonard Jeffries Jr., Jacob Carruthers, Ivan Van Sertima, Charles Finch III, Maulauna Karenga, Molefi Asante, Wade Nobles, James Turner, Runoko Rashidi, Nana Ekow Butweiku, Professor George E. Simmonds, Professor James Small, and Nile Valley scholar Reginald A. Mabry are also considered an integral part of that group. However, Carruthers, who wrote a short scholarly, but relatively unheralded book about the Haitian Revolution titled Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution, neglects to include the first Black Haitian Egyptologist and anthropologist Joseph Anténor Firmin in any of his categories. While Carruthers identifies three major schools of thought regarding Black Studies, Africanity, and/​ or Egyptology, essentialist Afrocentric scholar Clyde A.  Winters identifies four schools of thought accompanying Afrocentric sensibilities. These four African-​ centered philosophical schools are the perennialists, essentialists, existentialists, and progressivists. According to Winters, the perennialist Afrocentrists, such as Edward Blyden, Martin Delaney, and Frederick Douglass, view knowledge as an eternal truth by examining the classic scholarly works of the African intellectual tradition. For Winters, the perennialists postulated that you should use the Bible and the writings of the classical scholars who recognized the “Ancient Model” of history (i.e., Blacks played a major role in ancient history) in deciding on what to teach people about the ancient history of African Americans.10 Thus, “the Old Testament provides annals of the ancient Empires of Africa and Mesopotamia.”11 To enhance our understanding of an ancient and glorious African past, the essentialist Afrocentric scholar, according to Winters, utilizes scientific research and data, as illustrated in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois,

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At the Center of World History  155 John G.  Jackson, Leo Hansberry, and C.A. Winters, to analyze emerging research studies regarding the ancient history of Africa and Africans. For Winters, existentialist Afrocentrists such as Marcus Moziah Garvey, Arthuro Schomburg, J.A. Rogers, G.M. James, and Cheikh Anta Diop believed in building a better world by way of an Africalogical approach and understanding; whereas, the progressivist Afrocentrists, such as Maulana Karenga and Molefi Asante, believed in a revolutionary Afrocentric principal dimension and reconstructive approach by centering African culture, philosophy, and people at the center of world history. However, the African people who are properly placed at the center of world history tend to be men not women. Historically and currently, Afrocentric scholars (both male and female) have placed great emphasis on Imhotep and rightly so. Imhotep is a polymath who served as the architect and engineer of the first step pyramid in Kemet, the pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser. Imhotep is also the father of medicine, not Hippocrates. Yet, in placing great emphasis on Imhotep, scholars neglect the historical contributions of Merit Ptah (not to be confused with Merit-​Ptah, Ramose’s wife). Before Imhotep, who lived during the Third Dynasty of ancient Kemet, there was Merit Ptah, who lived during the Second Dynasty of ancient Kemet. Whereas, Imhotep is the father of medicine, Merit Ptah (God Ptah’s Beloved) is the mother of medicine, given that she is the first known female in science and the first known physician. Throughout ancient Kemet, it was Merit Ptah, not Imhotep, who was called “The Chief Physician.” Now, within our patriarchal academic and scholarly world, it is the name of Imhotep, not Merit Ptah, that is known as the “The Chief Physician.” In an interesting and ironic way, Merit Ptah is honored and featured at a tomb near the pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser built by Imhotep. In “properly placing African people at the center of world history,” women of color who are great public intellectuals and scholars, such as Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, Marie Vieux-​ Chauvet, Odette Roy Fombrun, Rosalind Jefferies, Iva Caruthers, Frances Cress Welsing, Charsee McIntyre, Marimba Ani, Ama Mazama, Rkhty Amen, Tyrene Wright, Claudine Michel, Bayyinah Bello, Marguerite Laurent (Ezili Danto), Dowoti Desir, Yvrose S. Gilles, Kaiama L.  Glover, Marlene L.  Daut, Judite Blanc, Katheline St. Fort (Kreyolicious), Edwidge Danticat, Roxane Gay, Alice Backer, and many more are excluded from these categorizations by male scholars and public intellectuals. In noticing the exclusion of Black women as scholars and public intellectuals at the center of world history, prominent historian Darlene Clark Hine in her essay “The Black Studies Movement: Afrocentric-​ Traditionalist-​ Feminist Paradigms for the Next Stage,” categorizes Afrocentric scholars as “Authentists” and “Originists” where Black female scholars are acknowledged. According to Hine:

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156  Patrick Delices The “Authentic” Black studies scholars and writers have likewise engaged in and produced important intellectual work. Most prominent among this group are Wade Nobles, Maulana Karenga, James Turner, Molefi Asante, Nathan and Julia Hare, Robert Staples, Ronald Bailey, Cedric Robinson, Haki Madhubuti, James Stewart, Asa Hilliard, Ak’im Akbar, and a host of others too numerous to mention. Among Black women “Authentists,” I  would include the following: Vivian Gordon, Kariana Welsh-​ Asante, Carol Barnes, Rosalind Jeffries, and Frances Cress Welsing.12 Hine further states that “some ‘Authentists’ are cultural nationalists, pan-​ Africanists, Afrocentrists, and Marxists. Their works are descriptive, prescriptive, or proscriptive.”13 According to the late Pulitzer Prize-​winning historian Manning Marable of Columbia University, Black intellectuals and their traditions fall under three categories: descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive.14 In descriptive, Marable basically states that Black scholars are participant observers who would present the collective reality of Black life and experiences from a Black perspective where the centrality of Black lives matters.15 However, Marable does not state exactly what that “Black perspective” is given the diversity of Black folks and our divergent intellectual approaches and scholarly methods, be it Marxism, feminism, decolonialism/​ decoloniality, universalism, Eurocentrism, or Afrocentricism. Whereas the descriptive type of Black intellectuals/​scholars focuses on cataloging, recounting, explaining, and including the historical realities and contributions of people of African descent, the Black intellectuals/​ scholars who engage in a corrective approach, according to Marable, seek to set the historical record straight by challenging, critiquing, and correcting the enduring intellectual tradition of global white supremacy of disregarding, disrespecting, and stereotyping Black folks as inferior and their global contributions as nonexistent or unscientific.16 In terms of prescriptive, Marable indicates that Black scholars prescribe practical steps and solutions to empower Black people by associating scholarship with service and struggle; theory with transformation; and analysis with action where the community and college are inseparable.17 Although the works of the “Authentists” could be either descriptive, prescriptive, or proscriptive, Hine points out that the overall “theme unifying the work of ‘Authentists’ is an intellectual and often overt political commitment to Black liberation from European, or more crassly white, categories of thought and analysis.”18 As such, Authentists are determined to create a new African methodology that allows Africans to control knowledge about themselves. Their rejection of European categories often means a rejection of “Traditionalist” and even “Black Feminists” approaches which remain rooted in “European” tenets of research, evidence and argument, even as they transform those tenets in use.19

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At the Center of World History  157 Hine further states of the earlier generation of Black Studies scholars and liberation activists who most inform the work of contemporary “Authentists” are Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Booker T.  Washington, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X., Langston Hughes, C.L.R. James, Franz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Eric Williams.20 In recognizing the scholars/​activists “who most inform the work of contemporary ‘Authentists,’ ” Firmin was never mentioned or considered. Furthermore, there was no mention of Firmin when Hine determined that African World scholars, Egyptologists, and Nile Valley scholars are a salient subdivision of “Authentists” categorized as “Originists.”21 Accordingly, Hine mentions the following: Originists, as the titles of their many books attest, argue that Africa is the cradle, or origin, of civilization (High Culture) and that most significantly Egyptians were African. In sum, the “Originists” provide African Americans with their own origin stories that lay claim to the credit for much of the knowledge that allegedly has been erroneously attributed to Greeks and Romans.22 For Hine, “the most prominent ‘Originists’ are Yosef ben-​Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke, John Jackson, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, St. Clair Drake, Ivan Van Sertima, and Cheikh Anta Diop.”23 Again, there is no mention or recognition of Firmin by Hine even though Firmin was the first Black Haitian Egyptologist and anthropologist to explore and settle the fact that “Africa is the cradle, or origin, of civilization (High Culture) and that most significantly Egyptians were African(s).”24 Although the “Old Scrappers” and their “Progressive Extensions” along with the “Existentialists,” “Perennialists,” “Authentists,” and “Originists” promoted the Afrocentric view that the ancient Egyptians were Black Africans and its ancient civilization was Black African, the first Black Haitian Egyptologist and anthropologist, Joseph Anténor Firmin, is excluded from these lists and categorizations as proposed by Carruthers, Winters, Marable, and Hine. Of course, one would expect Black (Afrocentric) scholars to include Firmin in any discussion regarding a formulation of an Afrocentric ancient historical knowledge repository, especially concerning the ancient Egyptians; however, they for the most part do not, but why?

At the Center of World History, Why Diop, Not Firmin? Nearly four months before the advent of the Berlin Conference on November 15, 1884, Firmin on July 17, 1884, became a member of the

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158  Patrick Delices prestigious, nearly all-​white Société d’Anthropologie de Paris (Society of Anthropology of Paris). At that time, and prior to Firmin, the field of anthropology basically focused on the physical aspects of humankind. Moreover, similarly to other fields in the humanities and social and natural sciences, knowledge, back then and now, is only produced by white males. In “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/​Sexism and the Four Genocides/​Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century,” prominent decoloniality scholar Ramón Grosfoguel upholds that globally westernized universities promote Eurocentric knowledge that comes from mainly the social-​historical and philosophical experiences of only white males from Greece, Italy, France, Germany, England, and the United States, which in turn produces all the social-​ historical and philosophical experiences of humanity while serving as the academic canon in higher education by making invisible the intellectual works of nonwhite scholars. However, in terms of the coloniality of knowledge, especially within the field of anthropology, Firmin in his engagement with the Society of Anthropology of Paris and with the publication of De l’égalité des races humaines (On the Equality of Human Races) transformed this narrow, nascent racist, colonial academic field of study by integrating biology, cosmology, philosophy, and sociology “beyond the limitations of the purely physical, to the intellectual and moral dimensions of the human species.”25 By the time Firmin published his first major work, On the Equality of Human Races, in 1885, anthropology was unfolding as a specialized field of study, while modern-​day Egyptology was only eighty-​seven years in the making when Napoleon Bonaparte along with his soldiers and scholars occupied Egypt from 1798 to 1801. Moreover, at the time of the publication of On the Equality of Human Races, social Darwinism was pervasive and the Berlin Conference was adjourning –​forever changing the political dynamics and economic landscape of Africa as African nations succumbed to European imperialism, ultimately giving rise to the notion of the “White Man’s Burden,” which became a salable asset to the psyche and actions of Europeans. With these realities, Firmin and his work became obscure. For anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-​Lobban, “perhaps because Firmin wrote in French rather than in English, or perhaps because he was Haitian and not French, or more likely because he so fundamentally challenged the racist science of his day, his work was ignored and became obscure.” However, the English writing of Black scholars, such as John H. Johnson’s Arguments and Observations of the Ethiopians of African Race; Martin Delaney’s 1879 publication titled Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color; preeminent feminist scholar Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists; Jacob Carruthers’s Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution; Wade Nobles’s The Island of Memes: Haiti’s Unfinished Revolution; and many more in the past and the present, have also been ignored.

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At the Center of World History  159 Yet, white racist French writers and their works, such as Count Arthur de Gobineau in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) culminated in the United States. Accordingly, “de Gobineau’s propaganda against the Blacks inferiority and the mixing color people –​one of the aspects of the Firmin’s contestation –​was immediately translated into English (1856), only 2–​3 years after its publication in French.”26 As a matter of fact, the English translation of de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races was published in 1856 at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court was presiding over the Dred Scott case.27 Firmin, being a critical, outspoken Black Haitian, played a major role in why he along with his work was made to be invisible. Moreover, given the coloniality of being, knowledge, and power, only whites who are superior and all knowing (knowledgeable) are capable of producing and distributing universal knowledge given their ability to control and colonize information along with other peoples’ land, labor, resources, bodies, and minds. Thus, to colonize information and monopolize the production and distribution of knowledge universally is to make Black writers invisible as their scholarly contributions to the production of knowledge are inconspicuous, marginalized, or silenced, especially if that production of knowledge challenges Eurocentric epistemology and white supremacist dogma. In “My Urgent Plea to American and European Historians and Scholars Who Write about the Haitian Revolution and Haiti’s National History,” one of the editors in this volume, Dr. Celucien Joseph, asserts boldly the following sentiment: Stop silencing works written by Haitian writers! Give them Credit in your work! Interact with their ideas and writings! Do not Ignore Them! Acknowledge their contribution to knowledge and to what you now know about your subject matter-​ -​ even when you are teaching and writing in English! Also, would you make it an intellectual habit when you write about Haiti in general or discuss Haiti’s national history in public or in your classroom, would you include Haitian scholars in your conversation and acknowledge their contribution. Interact with them in your scholarship, and do not ignore their work!28 Joseph’s assertion is extremely serious as it plays a major role in why so many Black Haitian scholars and public intellectuals, such as Firmin and I, are relatively unknown, silenced, ignored, marginalized, discredited, punished, or recognized decades later after one’s passing. As an example, Firmin’s nineteenth-​century French text was nearly forgotten, but ultimately translated into English by 2000. Hence, “the translation is a (late) recognition of a valid effort made by a Haitian scholar, at the end of the nineteenth century, to counter the racist ideas presented as founded

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160  Patrick Delices and scientific.”29 Moreover, “the book was out of print even in Haiti until 1968 (Panorama abridged edition) and 1985 (Fradin edition), when De l’égalité des Races Humaines was reprinted in the original and reintroduced to a modern generation of Haitians.”30 Thus, “we deeply regret that so much time passed before this work could be revealed to an English speaking audience. The volume waited more than a century before it could be translated into English” because “Firmin study was ignored or marginalized in the world of academia.”31 Unfortunately, during European imperialism and U.S. Jim Crow policies and practices, Firmin’s scholarship was not the only one that was ignored or marginalized. As an example, three years prior to the publishing of On the Equality of Human Races, Haitian scholars collaborated on a published text entitled: Les detracteurs de la race noire et de la Republique d’ Haiti (The detractors of the black race and the Republic of Haiti), which was edited by Louis-​Joseph Janvier, a prominent Haitian public intellectual, scholar, diplomat, journalist, and novelist, who is also relatively unknown. One year prior to Firmin’s On the Equality of Human Races, Janvier published Egalite des races (Equality of the races), which inspired Firmin to publish On the Equality of Human Races; however, these scholarly works remain to this day ignored and obscure. In terms of the obscurity of Haitian scholars and their production of knowledge, distinguished African American scholar, Brenda Gayle Plummer notes the following: Haitian intellectuals of the nineteenth century were unfortunate enough to inhabit a universe that perceived as outlandish the idea that erudite blacks could nurture a tradition of research, teaching, and publication. Haitians might believe their intellectualism erased the stigma of mental inferiority that racist enemies had imposed, but to their critics this merely proved the case against them.32 However, for historian David Nicholls in his From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti, it was not necessarily racism, despotism, or poverty that contributed to the obscurity of Firmin and his scholarship; it was also Firmin’s unpopular beliefs as a liberal, universalist, and staunch proponent of social Darwinism where he rationalized the dominance of Europeans over Africans as simply the survival of the fittest. Moreover, as a liberal, Firmin disavowed the more militant, radical noiriste movement along with its political philosophy of noirisme, which can be viewed as a precursor of Afrocentricism. As such, Firmin’s advocating that modern-​day Africans, given their lower status and descendance, should mimic European civilization, given their dominance and ascendancy, contributed possibly to his obscurity with modern-​ day Afrocentric scholars and Black public intellectuals.

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At the Center of World History  161 Firmin’s writing style in French is often described as lyrically poetic, scholarly elegant, passionately polemical, and scientifically cool and technical with a strong intellectual dose of neoclassical economics inferences and romantic exuberance.33 However, it is Firmin’s use of nineteenth-​ century scientific terminologies, concepts, and research methods along with his limited scholarly audience base, antiquated documentation techniques, wanting bibliographical references, unavailable annotations, and compendious writing style that possibly contributed to his obscurity with a broader intellectual public and lay audience. Therefore, according to scholar Asselin Charles, who translated Firmin’s On the Equality of Human Races from French to English, “it would have been an impossible task for the translator to reconstruct Firmin’s references and annotations, especially as some of the works are not accessible or available to the modern scholar,”34 which ultimately made the work of Firmin along with his identity obscure. Hine therefore keenly points out the following factor: Until quite recently neither the writings nor the identities of the “Authentic” Black studies academicians penetrated mainstream awareness. Recent magazine and newspaper articles have effectively captured the excitement, controversy, and tension surrounding the concept of Afrocentricity and the growing prominence of a contingent of speakers, writers, adjunct or retired professors variously referred to as Nile Valley scholars, Egyptologists, or African World scholars.35 It is these factors (media exposure and press coverage, and the timely distribution/​translation of knowledge), among many others, as expressed by Hine, that propelled Diop, not Firmin to center stage of world history and the limelight of Egyptologists and Afrocentric scholars. Moreover, Diop’s published works: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa; The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; Black Africa; Pre-​colonial Black Africa; Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology; and Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946–​ 1960 were translated from French to English and other languages, such as in Diop’s native tongue, Wolof. Not one of Firmin’s works has been translated into his native tongue, Haitian Creole, despite the recent prominence and popularity of such a beautiful and powerful language. In addition to the publication of On the Equality of Human Races, Firmin also authored Haïti et la France (Haiti and France), which was published in 1891; Une défense (A defense), which was published in 1892; Diplomate et diplomatie (Diplomat and diplomacy), which was published in 1898; M. Roosevelt, Président des États-​Unis et la République d’Haïti (Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States and the Republic of Haiti), which was published in 1905; and Lettres de Saint-​Thomas (Letters of St. Thomas), which was published in 1910. Only On the Equality of Human

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162  Patrick Delices Races has been translated into English. Moreover, there has been only one major text (biography) written about Firmin and that was by his intellectual protégé, Jean Price-​Mars, who, five years prior to his death, authored Joseph Anténor Firmin in 1964. Joseph Anténor Firmin by Price-​Mars was published in Port-​au-​Prince, Haiti, by Imprint Séminaire and has yet to be translated in any language. As a matter of fact, this French-​language biography of Firmin is essentially inaccessible as only three prominent university libraries (Yale, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins) in addition to the Library of Congress carry such a text. This current edited text by Celucien Joseph and Paul C. Mocombe along with its many scholarly contributions will serve as the third text specifically on Firmin and the second text about Firmin written in English. The first English text (journal) written about Firmin appeared as a special edition in the Journal of Pan-​African Studies (now, the Journal of Africology) in August 2014, edited by guest editor Gershom Williams of the Bennu Institute of Arizona. In terms of Diop, there are several scholarly volumes written about him, such as:

• Great African Thinkers, edited by Ivan Van Sertima; • Cheikh Anta Diop: An African Scientist, edited by E.  Curtis Alexander;

• Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait, by Molefi Asante; • Conversations avec Cheikh Anta Diop: La lecon du lotus •

(Conversations with Cheikh Anta Diop: The Lesson of the Lotus), by Khadim Ndiaye; and Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop & Theophile Obenga, by Chris Gray.

Unlike Firmin, all of Diop’s scholarly work dealt with Black Africa and/​ or the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization. Firmin did not produce a single major text specifically on the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization. However, Firmin has several chapters in On the Equality of Human Races devoted to Haiti, the Black (Human) “Race,” and the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization. Even in the major scholarly works concerning the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization, such as Nile Valley Civilization, Egypt: Child of Africa, and Egypt Revisited, edited by Ivan Van Sertima, there is no mention of Firmin –​not even a quote. The same applies to the UNESCO General History of Africa Volume II, Ancient Civilizations of Africa, edited by G.  Mokhtar, along with the scholarly works of prominent Afrocentric scholars and Egyptologists, such as George G.M. James, Chancellor Williams, Jacob Carruthers, Asa Hilliard, Yosef ben-​Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke, and many more. However, to their credit, Willis N. Higgins and John G. Jackson referenced Firmin along with major figures of the

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At the Center of World History  163 Haitian Revolution in their Introduction to African Civilizations, which was published in 1937. On Diop’s rise from obscurity to popularity, Dr. John Henrik Clarke states the following: I first became aware of the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop by reading the proceedings of the First and Second Conferences of Negro Writers and Artists. His work was a revelation to me personally because I had not encountered in print African scholars who were so forthright in challenging prevailing misconceptions about African History and putting forth a new, creative view with documents. When I read his contribution to this First Conference, “The Cultural Contribution and Prospects of Africa,” I began to inquire about his other writings. I discovered later that the content of the article was part of a chapter of a future book. In reading the proceedings of a Second Conference held in Rome, my curiosity grew concerning this new voice in the African wilderness of historiography. I later enquired about his work and discovered that Presence Africaine had published a comprehensive work of his on African History. I  later correspond with him as one of the founding members of the black Academy of Arts and Letters, and when I was asked to compile a list of 20 most important books on Africa written by Africans, his book, already referred to, was listed.36 Keep in mind that Dr.  Clarke wrote the above statement in 1974 in Freedomways Magazine, and that Firmin’s On the Equality of Human Races was not published in English until 2000. Also, keep in mind that many U.S.-​based Black Egyptologists and Afrocentric scholars do not speak, write, and read French. However, on November 17, 2018, I had the opportunity to meet and interview a U.S.-​based Afrocentric scholar who is fluent in French, Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr., the former chairman of the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York. I asked Dr.  Jeffries the following question, “Why Diop, not Firmin?” And Dr. Jeffries stated: Many Afrocentric scholars in the United States are simply not familiar with Firmin and his work given the fact that his work is written mostly in French and has not been translated in English for the most part along with the fact that his scholarship/​research is not contemporary, unlike Diop and his scholarship/​research.37 Yet Diop, who was fluent in French and attended conferences with Jean Price-​Mars, a scholarly disciple of Firmin, never mentioned Firmin in his scholarly works. Moreover, Mercer Cook of Howard University who translated Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization from French into English, had to know about Firmin given his close scholarly

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164  Patrick Delices relationship not only with Diop, but most importantly with Firmin’s protégé, Price-​Mars. Additionally, prominent African American novelist, social critic, and activist James Baldwin, who was also fluent in French, played a crucial role in exposing Diop to an English based audience in the United States. In his famous 1961 book Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin introduces the name of Cheikh Anta Diop to an American audience for the first time in his powerful essay “Princes and Power.”38 In “Princes and Power,” Baldwin, who was covering Le Congres des Ecrivains et Artistes Noir (The Conference of Negro African Writers and Artists) at the Sorbonne in 1956, expresses the following: The evening session began with a film, which I  missed, and was followed by a speech from Cheikh Anta Diop, which, in sum, claimed the ancient Egyptian empire as part of the Negro past. I can only say that this question has never greatly exercised my mind, nor did M.  Diop succeed in doing so  –​at least not in the direction he intended. He quite refused to remain within the twenty-​minute limit, and while his claims of the deliberate dishonesty of all Egyptian scholars [sic] may be quite well founded for all I know, I cannot say that he convinced me.39 Regarding Diop and his disquisition at the conference, Baldwin further states that “he was, however, a great success in the hall, second only, in fact to Aimé Cesaire.”40 Another key factor in terms of Diop being better known than Firmin is the fact that Diop advanced Firmin’s work on ancient Egypt by incorporating various research techniques, such as radiocarbon dating, which was developed during the time of Diop in the late 1940s, but was unavailable to Firmin, who died in 1911. Diop was able to take advantage of radiocarbon dating to measure, determine, and place an exclamation mark on Firmin’s original supposition that the ancient Egyptians and their civilization came from Black Africans from the south of Egypt. By establishing and directing a radiocarbon dating research center and laboratory, the Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire –​Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (IFAN) in Senegal, Diop, unlike Firmin, was able to scientifically, by the use of microscopic melanin analysis, determine the skin color/​“race” of the ancient Egyptians. This research method and application by Diop was a game changer in understanding and determining the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization. Moreover, in discussing and examining the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization, Diop expanded on the work of Firmin by linking Egypt with the rest of Black Africa and other continents not only in terms of a Black African presence, but also in terms of a Black African origin and influence. Case in point: Firmin mentions in his On the Equality of Human Races, that Columbus “discovered” America; whereas, Diop talks about an African

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At the Center of World History  165 origin, presence, and impact in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, not Columbus’s “discoveries.” Nevertheless, Firmin’s use of linguistic analysis to determine the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization is, as renowned Egyptologist Theophile Obenga attested, phenomenal. Obenga states: “What is striking and surprising is that Anténor Firmin writes authentically the Egyptian proper names, very close to the Egyptian language.”41 However, Diop took linguistics one step further than Firmin by connecting ancient Egyptians words with words in other Black African languages, such as Wolof –​thus, presenting convincingly a cultural (linguistic) unity of ancient Egypt with the rest of Black Africa. Firmin did not make such a connection, not even with ancient Egyptian terminologies with words from Haitian Creole given Haitian Creole’s West African roots and influence mixed with Taino, Arawak, Caribs, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English words, of course. Both Firmin and Diop utilized with great competency linguistics to strengthen their historical arguments regarding the Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their civilization. Diop simply advanced Firmin’s linguistic research and framework by presenting convincingly a genetic relationship between the language of ancient Egypt and the languages of Black Africa –​thus, proving an African family of languages based on comparative linguistics and historical reconstruction, commonality and continuity.42 Even though Firmin did not engage in comparative linguistics in terms of making a linguistic connection between the languages of ancient Egypt and Haiti, neither did Diop, given that Wolof like Haitian Creole genetically comes from the Niger-​Congo language family and both are Bantu based. Diop’s comparative linguistic research methods did not focus on the languages spoken/​ written in the Americas; his linguistic research methods only focused on ancient Egypt and Black Africa. As such, unlike Firmin, Diop’s linguistic research methods were only concerned with the following:

• Signifying an African language such as Wolof to take in and under-

• •

stand fully scientific and mathematical concepts that are abstract, as illustrated in his translation of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity into Wolof; Claiming a genetic linguistic relationship between Wolof, ancient Egypt, and other Black African languages; Assembling politically Wolof as the national language of Senegal.43

Moreover, at the First World Black Festival of Arts and Culture in Dakar, Senegal in 1966, Diop and W.E.B. Du Bois, another Black prominent scholar with Haitian ancestry, were identified as the scholars who exerted the greatest influence on African people in the twentieth century. No such honor has been bestowed on Firmin despite his remarkable scholarship

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166  Patrick Delices and contribution. In addition, there is also a recent documentary about Cheikh Anta Diop called Kemtiyu, Cheikh Anata, by Ousmane William Mbaye. Currently, no such documentary exists for Firmin. Diop, unlike Firmin, even has a university named after him, the University of Dakar in Senegal, which was renamed Cheikh Anta Diop University. Given the reasons above, Hine and many others can boldly declare that “the father of the scholarly project to reclaim and reconstruct the African basis of Western civilization, beginning with a reidentification of Egypt as African was Cheikh Anta Diop, author of The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Diop espoused the theory of the cultural unity between Egypt and Africa in order that a revision of the curriculum of African history would teach the young their own history “rather than that of the colonizer.”44

Conclusion In a recently published book, The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, “one of the most distinguished contemporary (Afrocentric) scholars,” Dr.  Molefi Asante in his essay “The Philosophy of Afrocentricity,” proclaims the following: No other African intellectual holds the distinguished chair as the fountain of Afrocentric studies but the Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop. This is because Diop dared to question the construction of knowledge imposed by Europe on African historiography and endeavored to use all of his intellectual gifts to attack the construction of a false white Egypt. Seeing the falsification of history as one of the biggest crimes against Africa and Africans, Cheikh Anta Diop launched his assault with the book translated in English as The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. In addition to this book, Diop also wrote Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology to underscore the African origin of human civilization. Afrocentrists see Diop’s methods as Afrocentric because they place African people in the center of their own history. How Diop studied the African presence in civilization became a model for numerous other studies of Afrocentric scholarship. His influence on Ivan Van Sertima, Theophile Obenga, Moussa Lam, and John Henrik Clarke made him as international figure in African Studies.45 However, Firmin, decades before Diop, also dared to question the construction of knowledge imposed by Europe on African historiography and endeavored to use all of his intellectual gifts to attack the construction of a false white Egypt. Perhaps Afrocentrists do not view Firmin and his methods within the paradigm of Afrocentrism, but more in line with a particular ideology such as Pan-​Africanism and social Darwinism, which explains Diop’s popularity and not Firmin’s. On Firmin, Asante states:

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At the Center of World History  167 Afrocentricity is a paradigm and pan-​Africanism is an ideological call for African unity and solidarity. When the first conference and congresses of Pan-​Africanism were initiated the organizers simply saw Pan-​Africanism as bringing as many Africans together as possible in order to change the colonial status of the African people. Among the leaders of this movement were many African Americans and African Caribbean people, including Henry Sylvester-​Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Antenor Firmin. Both Sylvester-​Williams and Du Bois led their own conventions and congresses. Antenor Firmin (October 18, 1850–​September 19, 1911)  might be considered the single most important African anthropologist of his generation.46 Whether they used different or similar research methodologies (Diop’s research method of course was more advanced and scientific, while Firmin’s was strictly positivist), and come from contrasting intellectual trajectories and revolutionary influences, both Firmin and Diop agreed and concluded that there is a Black African origin of the ancient Egyptians and their great civilization. Moreover, their research methodologies, intellectual trajectories, and revolutionary influences transformed Firmin and Diop not only as vindicationist public intellectuals, but also scholars who engaged in what prominent academic Brenda Gayle Plummer identifies as the “indigenous polemic tradition” that calls for the use of scholarship and service to solve problems, while analysis is adopted as action that is either reformative or revolutionary.47 In terms of their scholarship, both Firmin and Diop were revolutionaries. As such, Joseph Anténor Firmin is not only considered one of the founding fathers of Pan-​Africanism and Pan-​Americanism, but he is also considered the first Black Egyptologist and anthropologist who was and still is at the center of world history along with Cheikh Anta Diop.

Notes 1 Patrick Delices, “Cementing Scholarship with Service: The Intellectual Evolution of Jean Price-​Mars’ Two Worlds,” in Between Two Worlds: Jean Price-​Mars, Haiti, and Africa, eds. Celucien L. Joseph, Jean Eddy Saint Paul, and Glodel Mezillas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 2018, 31–​58. 2 Gershom Williams, “Deconstructing Pseudo-​Scientific Anthropology: Antenor Firmin and the Reconceptualization of African Humanity,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, August 2014, 16. 3 James Spady, “Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop and the Background of Scholarship on Black Interest in Egyptology and Nile Valley Civilizations,” Presence Africaine, Nouvelle serie, No. 149/​150, Hommage a Cheik Anta Diop, 1989, 294–​297. 4 Ibid., 294–​295. 5 Ibid., 295. 6 Ibid., 18. 7 Jacob Carruthers, Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1992), 36.

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168  Patrick Delices 8 Ibid., 36. 9 Ibid.,  36–​37. 10 Clyde A. Winters, “Ancient Afrocentric History and the Genetic Model,” in Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy, ed. Molefi Asante and Ama Mazama (Chicago: African American Images, 2000), 130. 11 Ibid. 12 Darlene Clark Hine, “The Black Studies Movement: Afrocentric-​ Traditionalist-​Feminist Paradigms for the Next Stage,” The Black Scholar, Summer 1992, 15. 13 Ibid. 14 Manning Marable, “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” Souls (2000), 17. 15 Ibid.,  17–​18. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.,  17–​36. 18 Hine, “The Black Studies Movement,” 15–​16. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Carolyn Fluehr-​Lobban, “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, vol. 102, no. 3 (Sept. 2000): 452. 26 Watson R. Denis, “The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) by Anténor Firmin and Asselin Charles,” Caribbean Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (Jan.–​June 2006): 326. 27 Williams, “Deconstructing Pseudo-​Scientific Anthropology,” 18. 28 Celucien Joseph, “My Urgent Plea to American and European Historians and Scholars Who Write about the Haitian Revolution and Haiti’s National History,” Facebook, February 7, 2019. 29 Denis, “The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) by Anténor Firmin and Asselin Charles,” 326. 30 Carolyn Fluehr-​Lobban, “Anténor Firmin, 453. 31 Ibid., 326. 32 Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 70–​71. 33 Anténor Firmin, On the Equality of Human Races (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), ix. 34 Ibid., x. 35 Hine, “The Black Studies Movement,” 16. 36 John Henrik Clarke, “Cheikh Anta Diop and the New Concept of African History,” in Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop, ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick, NJ: Journal of African Civilizations, 1974), 110. 37 Patrick Delices, Interview with Dr.  Leonard Jeffries Jr., Personal Interview, Institute of the Black World, Pan-​ African Unity Dialogue (IBW, PAUD) Meeting, New York, November 17, 2018. 38 James Spady, “The Changing Perception of C.A. Dioip and His Work: The Preeminence of a Scientific Spirit,” in Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop, ed. Ivan Van Sertima, (New Brunswick, NJ: JAF, 1989), 90.

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At the Center of World History  169 9 James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (NY: Dell Publishing, 1963), 46. 3 40 Ibid. 41 Theophile Obenga, “Hommage a Antenor Firmin (1850–​1911), Egyptologue Haitien/​ Homage to Antenor Firmin (1850–​ 1911), Haitian Egyptologist,” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 112. 42 Chris Gray, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop & Theophile Obenga, (London: Karnak House, 1989), 79. 43 Ibid. 44 Hine, “The Black Studies Movement,” 16. 45 Molefi Asante, “The Philosophy of Afrocentricity,” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, ed. Afolayan, Adeshina, Falola, Toyin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 237–​238. 46 Ibid. 47 Plummer, Haiti and the United States, 72.

Bibliography Asante, Molefi. “The Philosophy of Afrocentricity.” The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy. Edited by Afolayan, Adeshina, Falola, Toyin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017, 231–​244. Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dell, 1963. Carruthers, Jacob. Essays in Ancient Egyptian Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1992. Clarke, John Henrik. “Cheikh Anta Diop and the New Concept of African History.” Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop. Edited by Ivan Van Sertima. New Brunswick, NJ: Journal of African Civilizations, 1974, 110–​117. Delices, Patrick. “Cementing Scholarship with Service: The Intellectual Evolution of Jean Price-​Mars’ Two Worlds.” Between Two Worlds: Jean Price-​Mars, Haiti, and Africa. Edited by Celucien L. Joseph, Jean Eddy Saint Paul, and Glodel Mezillas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018, 31–​58. Delices, Patrick. Interview with Dr.  Leonard Jeffries Jr. Personal Interview. Institute of the Black World, Pan-​ African Unity Dialogue (IBW, PAUD) Meeting. New York, 2018. Denis, Watson R. “The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) by Antenor Firmin and Asselin Charles.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (Jan.–​June 2006): 325–​334. Firmin, Anténor. On the Equality of Human Races. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Fluehr-​Lobban, Carolyn. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, vol. 102, no. 3 (Sept. 2000), 458–​466. Gray, Chris. Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop & Theophile Obenga. London: Karnak House, 1989 Grosfoguel, Ramon. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/​ Sexism and the Four Genocides/​ Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-​ Knowledge, vol. 11, issue 1 (2013): 73–​90. Hine, Darlene Clark. “The Black Studies Movement: Afrocentric-​Traditionalist-​ Feminist Paradigms for the Next Stage.” The Black Scholar (Summer 1992):  11–​18.

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170  Patrick Delices Joseph, Celucien L. “Anténor Firmin, the ‘Egyptian Question,’ and Afrocentric Imagination.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 127–​176. Joseph, Celucien L. “My Urgent Plea to American and European Historians and Scholars Who Write about the Haitian Revolution and Haiti’s National History.” Facebook (February 7, 2019). Marable, Manning. “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain.” Souls (2000): 17–​36. Nicholls David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Obenga, Theophile. “Hommage a Antenor Firmin (1850–​1911), Egyptologue Haitien/​ Homage to Antenor Firmin (1850–​ 1911), Haitian Egyptologist.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 108–​126. Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Spady, James. “The Changing Perception of C.A. Diop and His Work: The Preeminence of a Scientific Spirit.” Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop. Edited by Ivan Van Sertima. New Brunswick, NJ: JAF, 1989, 89–​101. Williams, Gershom. “Deconstructing Pseudo-​Scientific Anthropology: Antenor Firmin and the Reconceptualization of African Humanity.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, (August 2014): 9–​33. Winters, Clyde A. “Ancient Afrocentric History and the Genetic Model.” Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy. Edited by Molefi Asante and Ama Mazama. Chicago: African American Images, 2002, 121–​163.

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Part 3

Firmin, Universalism, and Western Intellectual History

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9  Firmin and the Laws of Multilineal Evolution Matthew Carson Allen

Firmin’s 1885 magnum opus De l’égalité des races humaines, with its subtitle ‘anthropologie positive’, leaves little doubt as to the emancipatory potential of Comtean positivism. Its emphasis on the universal and uniform action of a finite set of laws allowed Firmin to unseat the prejudice underlying scientific racism. However, this is not the whole story. As a philosophy of history, positivism was hostile to difference. In its unilineal model of evolution, the apotheosis of history comes about through the universal imposition of European modernity. Firmin is highly attuned to these tensions. In De l’égalité, we see him advance a critical reading of Auguste Comte which embraces the French thinker’s emphasis on law while dispensing with his eurocentrism. Drawing on readings from an array of thinkers in various fields, such as Broca, Hegel, and W.D. Whitney, Firmin articulates a theory of parallel historical evolution originating independently in multiple centres. It continued to inform his thinking about the history and geopolitical situation of Haiti over the course of his career. In this chapter, we will examine Firmin’s readings of contemporary debates and recover the originality of his theory of multilineal evolution. This theory consisted in isolating historical law from its realization in any specific cultural form. It allowed Firmin to conceptualize the coexistence of multiple developmental trajectories, and to rescue Haitian modernity from the charge of mimicry of Europe. Although constituting a common stage of development, modernity for Firmin is reachable by numerous paths, and takes on different forms depending on local circumstances. Through the catalogues of illustrious Haitian writers, intellectuals, generals, jurists and politicians which occupy a large portion of De l’égalité, Firmin sought to demonstrate to a European readership just how far his homeland had progressed under its own impetus since the overthrow of colonial rule. Firmin’s aim, in his intellectual output as well is in his later political career, was to secure a place for Haiti in the concert of nations. His theory of history is worth our attention as a unique synthesis of universalism which does not seek to obliterate difference.

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174  Matthew Carson Allen

The Emancipatory Potential of Positivism The period Anténor Firmin spent in 1884 as a visiting scholar at the Parisian Société d’Anthropologie was marked by disappointment. The august institution of learning failed to uphold the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and the universal rights of man. Instead, Firmin was confronted with prejudice, with one member asking if his intellectual prowess could be attributed to his having white ancestors.1 Firmin’s magnum opus, De l’égalité des races humaines, was his attempt to ‘write back’ to the Société and expose the prejudices and errors he had encountered there. He did this through a meticulous reading of a wide array of sources, revealing the supposedly scientific proof of racial inequality to be subtended by an unconscious and unquestioned belief in myth. In the preface to the work, Firmin announces his aim to shed light on ‘the scientific reasons why most of my fellow scientists divide the human species into superior and inferior races’. Following this, he acknowledges the source of the epistemological critique that underpins his book: Whatever they [specialist readers] find good in it is due to the effectiveness of the positivist methodology which I have tried to apply to anthropology, founding all my inductions on the principles already recognized in the established sciences.2 As Firmin specifies later on, the ‘méthode positive’ is that devised by Comte, the principal theme of whose work was the establishment of the proper bases of observation and theorization by which all of the sciences can best capture the underlying laws that govern reality.3 As Firmin’s characterization of it indicates, positivism drew attention to the conditions of knowledge production. Firmin’s contrast between ‘induction’ and ‘method’ hints at one of the school’s main tenets, namely, that the premises one applies to study the world determine the conclusions one draws. By foregrounding his own method of reasoning, Firmin begins his work by appealing to the higher order of verifiability that he was to apply to the work of his contemporaries in the science of man, who more often than not turned out to fall short of the ideal.4 Comtean positivism had emancipatory potential because it provided the basis for a scientific worldview free of prejudice. Additionally, Comte’s philosophy of history held all human societies be subject to the same laws of evolution. The two sides were inextricably linked, because Comte embedded his epistemology within an account of the development of human consciousness. First articulated in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830–​42), Comte advanced a theory which identified the cause of social evolution with changes in the way the human mind comprehends the world. ‘Positivism’ as a worldview corresponded to a specific stage of historical development, and could only come about once ‘the human mind gave up its quest to determine the first causes of phenomena and related

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  175 facts by explanatory laws confirmed by taking observation’.5 As the pinnacle of history, it is the successor to the ‘theological’ and ‘metaphysical’ stages. In these earlier stages, the principle of causality is assigned to deities or personified forces of nature. The first, theological stage is itself divided into fetishistic, polytheistic and monotheistic sub-​states, which form a necessary sequence through which all human societies must pass.6 Positivism attributed uniformity to historical processes by explaining everything in terms of the development of mentality. The ‘otherness’ of Africa is minimized in Comtean philosophy, which characterizes African society as a last representative of the fetishistic stage through which all human societies pass. Although it is the most primitive, the fetishistic stage had the merit for Comte of not sidelining the emotions in favour of the intellect, and for this reason he saw fetishism as a source of inspiration for the positivist phase. Positivism involves the holistic reintegration of all of man’s faculties, and hence ‘the highest stage of civilization was in effect a return to the beginning’.7 In reintegrating all that had been lost in the intervening historical periods, the positivist stage evidenced a central tenet of the Comtean epistemological method: the harmonious integration of opposites. This contrasts sharply with the progress of knowledge according to Hegel, who like Comte grounded epistemology in historical development. If incipient positivism ‘was impressed by the orderly universe described by natural scientific laws’, for the Hegelian dialectic ‘negation was the creative force’.8 The influence of Comte is readily apparent in Firmin’s work. He begins De l’égalité with an epistemological statement in favor of positivism and its insistence on the proper classification of the sciences. The rise of naturalism over the course of the nineteenth century had seen the philosophical approach to the nature of man lose out to the biological. Hence anthropology had become synonymous with the natural history of man. Firmin offers a corrective to what he perceives as physiological determinism: man cannot be studied as one would any other animal, and thus anthropology is ‘the study of Man in his physical, intellectual, and moral dimensions, as he is found among the different races which constitute the human species’.9 Firmin refers to the Comtean classification of sciences in order to identify the appropriate ‘reasoning tools [bases de jugement]’ for the study of anthropology.10 According to Comte, the hierarchy of sciences needs to reflect the hierarchy of natural phenomena; both hierarchies are governed by a ‘universal order’.11 The sciences are to be arranged in a sequence according to ‘the decreasing generality of phenomena as well as their increasing complexity’; the most general science is mathematics, whereas the most particular is ‘social physics’, which was Comte’s term for the positive science of society.12 Firmin’s hierarchy differs in its particulars but follows the same structuring principle. Accordingly, ethnography, which treats the family of man and its subdivisions in both physiological and moral terms, is more general than ethnology, which ‘divides them [peoples] into distinct races, studies their

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176  Matthew Carson Allen different organic constitutions, considers their typical variations [variétés typiques]’.13 Both ethnography and ethnology are surpassed in scope for Firmin by anthropology, which goes beyond description and classification and addresses questions of such fundamental significance as to address what is the true nature of Man? To what extent and under what conditions does he develop his potential? Are all the human races capable of rising to the same intellectual and moral level?14 The proper classification of the various sciences of man needs to be observed in order to avoid hasty judgements about the specific aptitudes of different races. The aim is to avoid submitting anthropology to an ‘arbitrary ranking of the human races and their respective aptitudes’.15 Positivism, by contrast, provides the basis for establishing reasoned hierarchies. Firmin also evokes Comte’s universalist philosophy of history and its projection of a harmonious future fusion. Alongside Firmin’s embrace of the positivist theory of knowledge, he refers to Comte’s most famous neologism, ‘altruism’, as the ideal which ought to govern human affairs. Firmin at one point asserts that the goal of ‘healthy philosophy consists in following the laws of nature [se conformer aux lois de la nature] as we contribute intelligently to reinforcing the harmony of all elements, human beings, and things on the immense expanse of our planet’. Moreover, ‘this need for harmony underlies the altruistic sentiments which make of humanity a concrete entity whose interdependent parts act, work, and progress toward a common destiny’.16 Firmin echoes Comte’s conviction that the final phase of history will bring with it the coordination of all of humanity’s disparate parts. Both thinkers ground this unity in the universal applicability of laws. In Comte’s words, ‘the fundamental laws of human evolution, which establish the philosophical basis of the ultimate regime, are necessarily appropriate to all climates and all races, except for mere differences in speed [sauf de simples inégalités de vitesse]’.17 In order for society to advance to the positivist phase, people must become aware of the oneness of humanity. This view is echoed in Firmin’s suggestion, on the closing page of his work, that the precondition for achieving a future state of harmony is that individuals ‘take an interest in one another’s progress and happiness and cultivate those altruistic sentiments which are the greatest achievement of the human heart and mind’.18 The only differentiating factor in the application of universal law is the rapidity with which societies proceed up the stages of development. Disparities in development do not call into question the unity of the human race, and hence despite the state of deep degradation in which those savage races are believed to be, they have not lost their right to partake in humanity’s common patrimony [patriomoine], that is, their right to progress. It

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  177 is never too late for them to commence the marvellous march upward to travel the same road that led the civilized nations [les peuples civilisés] to their current level of achievement.19 This forms the basis for what Bernasconi has identified as the basis of Firmin’s concept of equality as an ‘equality of potential’, which is to say that all races are equally capable of developing and attaining higher degrees of civilization.20 The context of debate within the Société may provide further explanation for Firmin’s endorsement of positivism. Under the influence of Paul Broca, the Société was forged in the union of polygenism and positivism, the former manifest in the group’s rejection of the Biblical unity of the family of man, the latter in its resistance to speculative theorizing.21 Broca was one of the most famous advocates of the polygenetic account of human origins, which regards races as separate species originating independently from one another. The alternative, monogenetic explanation conceived of humanity as a single species and retained race as an important, though secondary, classification. Certain proponents of monogenesis, such as James Cowles Prichard, advanced a ‘unitary’ rendition a theory according to which all modern humans were descendants of the original Biblical couple Adam and Eve.22 Monogenesis was compromised in Broca’s view because of the extreme positions that its logic compelled, in particular ‘the one-​ancestor doctrine with its implication that mixture meant decay and slavery’.23 Broca’s rejection of this doctrine is echoed in De l’égalité. Having surveyed competing theories, Firmin articulates his own position, which is monogenetic but with a heavy polygenetic influence. Humanity constitutes a single ‘species’, although this does not imply descent from a single pair.24 The emergence of racial ‘varieties’ is a latter development, the result of ‘great cataclysms’ in the Earth’s climate and geology, which caused the unified species to disperse, and favoured adaptation to local environment.25 This account allows Firmin to square the circle, reconciling the ‘autochthonous origin of the great human races’ with the unity of the human species.26 However, despite Broca’s guiding influence, the Société was not a monoculture. Among its members were the monogenist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages and Clémence Royer, Charles Darwin’s first French translator.27 An early proponent of social Darwinism, Royer expanded the scope of the theory of natural selection by applying it to human relations.28 Positivists opposed any use of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which they regarded as a hypothesis lacking proof, as a justification for the idea of ‘combat for life’ within society.29 They referred to their opponents as ‘materialists’, a label which Royer herself rejected.30 While still alive and at the helm, Broca had been successful in mediating the positions of the materialist and positivist factions. When debate reached an impasse, Broca proved adept at suggesting terms that were neutral in the discursive context of the Société. For instance, he recommended referring to

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178  Matthew Carson Allen different human groups as ‘races’ rather than espèces or variétés, which would imply endorsement of polygenism or monogenism respectively, and using the term transformisme instead of évolution, which obviated the need to endorse or reject Darwin.31 Yet the environment of amicable debate was not to last. After 1870, the materialists won out, with many positivists leaving. Broca died in 1880. He was succeeded as secretary general by Topinard, a positivist who was in turn voted out of office in 1886 to be replaced by a materialist.32 The Société which Firmin knew was therefore more riven by factions than it had been under Broca’s leadership. Support for positivism was on the wane, which highlights the polemical nature of Firmin’s intervention. The rise of Darwinism, and in particular its social Darwinist inflection, displaced Broca’s theses. Whereas Broca’s polygenesis had left the possibility open that distinct races nonetheless share an equal potential for development, Royer, in her reading of Darwin, denied equality in favour of perennial struggle, which she saw as a source of dynamism. De l’égalité constitutes Firmin’s principled stand for positivism, which was perhaps out of step with the times. Indeed, as an eclectic work of scholarship, Firmin’s work is recuperative, locating progressive ideas in unexpected places. Firmin deploys the insights derived from positivist epistemology in his critique of contemporary anthropology. He demonstrates awareness of the contingent factors that play a role in the production of knowledge, suggesting that many scholars err not out of malice, but because their unquestioned epistemological frameworks compel them to do so. Early sections of the book contain a patient sifting through of the craniological measurements provided by scholars such as Broca as evidence of inherent racial difference. The results prove to be inconclusive, and on closer examination fail to demonstrate the thesis of the inferiority of Blacks. Firmin disputes the statistical method of the authors he critiques. Broca and Topinard presented figures arrived at by averaging the results of the cranial measurement of several skulls. What would seem to be empirical is in fact guided by a falsehood: these are only [statistical] means; they will never have any value in anthropology except as an approximation of an ideal type for a particular ethnic group, a type which does not exist in nature and which varies depending on the researcher. In the oscillations of the maximums and minimums in each series, conflated to obtain the means presented above, we find further evidence of a chaos signifying no less than the inanity of the arbitrary theories by which some people persist in dividing the human races into superior and inferior ones.33 While the measurements may derive from observation, the categories they are intended to quantify are not immanent in the world. The authors’ claims of statistical objectivity belie their failings as observers. The

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  179 catalogue of facts contained in these sections of De l’égalité serves to discredit empiricism, which Firmin looks down upon, variously qualifying it as vulgaire, grossier and arbitraire (vulgar, crude and arbitrary).34 Firmin may have derived his mistrust of empiricism from the work of Comte, who intended his positivist system to address the errors stemming from ‘the systematic empiricism that people endeavour to impose on social and above all historical observation, outlawing, under the pretext of impartiality, the employment of any theory’.35 To be positivist, neither induction nor deduction on its own can suffice.36 Although positivism insists that hypotheses be backed up by empirical observation, Comte recognized that the act of observation itself proceeds by making theories about the world and testing them against sense data.37 Prejudice that wears the mask of empiricism is more pernicious than incorrect postulates about the world, as long as the latter are stated in explicit terms. Conversely, flashes of insight can be recuperated from works that are otherwise compromised by ungrounded prejudice. Firmin’s willingness to assess the mitigating circumstances in the production of knowledge explains his nuanced reading of Broca. Firmin was able to make productive use of Broca’s other postulates without wholeheartedly agreeing with the latter’s conclusions. As an adherent of polygenesis, Broca may seem like an unlikely source for thinking about racial equality. If Firmin ultimately endorses the monogenetic account, he does so ambivalently, stating at one point that he feels no ‘particular repugnance for the polygenist doctrine’.38 Broca has the merit in Firmin’s eyes of abandoning the biblical account of human origin. His anti-​clericalism meant that he was not tempted to adduce the biblical curse of Ham as evidence for African inferiority. As Firmin notes, a view of monogenesis inspired by the biblical account of the sons of Noah had been used as a justification for slavery.39 Firmin associates racial prejudice among such contemporary intellectuals as Renan with the persistence of ‘the old Biblical myth so firmly anchored in a corner of the European mind’.40 The polygenetic account is perhaps more readily associated with the defence of slavery. However, as Firmin notes, this interpretation was more characteristic of writers in the United States, whereas in France the theory was embraced by scholars who were determined to free science from religious dogma.41 In order to be legitimate in Firmin’s eyes, monogenesis must dispense with the biblical account of degeneration from an initial act of creation. Firmin contrasts the monogenetic theory, which is founded in science, with the ‘unitarian theory’ (doctrine unitaire]), which is in reality ‘an article of faith drawn from theological traditions’.42 Many supporters of the monogenetic theory, Firmin writes, invoke the Biblical narrative of descent in order to attribute the emergence of racial difference to degeneration. Firmin quotes directly from Broca’s denunciation of monogenetic descent and its implication of a ‘more or less deserved curse’ visited by God on inferior races.43 At its most minimal level, the polygenesis, as understood by Firmin, merely proposes that ‘human beings do not

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180  Matthew Carson Allen all descend from a single ancestor or originate from a single geographical location, as averred in the Biblical tradition’.44 By not being wedded to this unitary account, Broca could advance other explanations for the existence of racial difference. He was able to entertain the proposition that, to quote Firmin, ‘the human species appeared in several different regions on earth’, all the while exhibiting a ‘single blueprint [unité de plan]’.45 Broca’s approach highlighted the uniform and universal influence of law. In this regard, he went further even than Comte in generalizing the principle of law and its equal validity for all races. Broca’s polygenesis of origin combined with the universal action of developmental law made it possible for Firmin to argue that races can attain an equivalent level of development independently of one another. This is apparent in his contention that the civilizing influence of Haiti has led to an increase of physical beauty among the republic’s Black population. On this basis, Firmin argues that ‘the beauty of a race, in most cases, is commensurate with its level of civilization; physical beauty develops particularly under the influence of climatic conditions which are either naturally favorable or made suitable by human industry’.46 Firmin’s aesthetic theory assumes the existence of a universally applicable scale of value which nonetheless accommodates the distinct instantiation of the ideal of beauty. Beauty exists both as an ideal and as an array of specific manifestations which come about when individual races realize their latent developmental potential. These twin axes of the universal and the particular closely resemble the relationship between law and its local manifestations in Broca’s polygenetic theory. Broca posited the existence of separate places of origin for individual races, retaining the concept of filiation but expanding the number of prototypes. The parallel development of separate races suggested the universal action of the same laws according to which, to borrow a metaphor deployed by Quatrefages, ‘the evolutionary tree of Darwin with its multiple branches was transformed into a “forest” of trees’.47 Firmin synthesized the principles of poly-​and monogenesis via the introduction of geographical determinism as a factor initiating a process of social, rather than biological adaptation. Firmin declares at one point that there is a single human species, but that ‘while admitting the unity of the species, we absolutely reject the separate idea of the unity of origin, Adamic or not, according to which all human beings descend from a single couple’.48 While admitting that the species marks the limit within which organisms can reproduce, we must also suppose that its serial constitution corresponds to a certain evolution of life on our planet and that the species entertains with the environment a relationship of direct dependence, which can logically be considered as a relationship of cause and effect. As evolution occurred simultaneously or successively in several areas on earth,

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  181 each species arose with a particular constitution that was much the same everywhere.49 As well as preserving difference, this model also means that similarity no longer necessarily implies a common origin. Firmin borrows heavily from Broca’s idea of ‘ongoing spontaneous generation, postulating that life could appear wherever suitable conditions occurred’.50 This idea was apparently in the air when Firmin was writing, as it emerged beyond the field of evolutionary biology, as evidenced by the work of anti-​positivist anthropologists. The folklorist Andrew Lang, writing one year before the publication of De l’égalité, provided a potent argument in defence of anthropological comparisons between locales and times which never came into contact with one another: ‘similar conditions of mind produce similar practices, apart from identity of race, or borrowing of ideas and manners’.51 This approach avoided the need for diffusion in order to explain the appearance of similar artefacts in far apart locales.

Firmin and the Limitations of Positivism Although positivism as a philosophy of science could be used to combat prejudice, its philosophy of history tended to subsume difference into uniformity, and therein lay its fatal flaw. The positivistic solution to difference was to temporalize it. The problem consisted in interpreting the wealth of data about human society, accessible to us through history and ethnography, through the lens of a single temporal perspective. Tzvetan Todorov identifies this process with the Enlightenment universalism of such writers as Diderot. From Condorcet, who believed universal law could be established on the basis of the universal identity of human nature, Comte developed his own view that ‘it is possible to establish—​with the help of science—​the one and only “correct” constitution, which will rapidly impose itself on all peoples, transcending national differences’.52 As a result, positivism as an intellectual movement was inherently Eurocentric, taking European civilization as the measure, although this is not to negate its enthusiastic adoption in Latin America.53 Firmin does not tackle this limitation of Comte’s philosophy head-​on, as this would risk eroding one of the foundations of his own critique. Firmin’s criticism of positivism emerges through a more subtle modification of Comtean philosophy of history, aiming at according greater space and autonomy to Africa and to Black historical experience. Before proceeding to Firmin’s more subtly expressed revisions to the Comtean model, it is helpful to consider his overt opposition to narratives that appeal to natural law in order to sanction the imposition of uniformity onto difference by means of violence. They reveal the perils of uniformity which, because stated in more strident terms, are more apparent than in Comte’s writing.

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182  Matthew Carson Allen Chief among these was social Darwinism. This school of thought assumed that the principles of natural selection still hold true for human society, a position Firmin denies, arguing that racial difference represents such a slight degree of variation viewed against the overall evolutionary trajectory of the human species that the mechanism of natural selection cannot be brought to bear. Environmental determinism does play a part in Firmin’s account, insofar as adaptive responses to the environment ‘can explain the development of certain organic aptitudes in a race in response to living conditions’.54 The impetus for these adaptations is not rooted in biology, but in social organization. Hence ‘a population can move away from unfavorable environmental conditions in several ways’.55 This is consistent with Firmin’s delineation of social and technological mechanisms in human evolution: elsewhere he specifically separates ‘savage man’ (l’homme sauvage) existing in thrall to the natural world, from man’s historical existence. The former is painted in Hobbesian terms as a struggle of all against all: ‘this is indeed a terrifying picture, this evocation of savage man unarmed and naked before these unrelenting attacks. His existence is uncertain; each step he takes may well be his last’.56 The advent of civilization marks man’s complete divorce from the state of nature: Such an achievement is so beautiful, the reality of such a metamorphosis is so extraordinary, as to leave incredulous the descendant of antediluvian man who is enjoying today all the refinements of civilization, luxuriating in the bloom of delicate sentiments, true flowers of the heart, and revelling in the headiness of scientific ideas, true flowers of the mind.57 This is in contrast to Royer who justified colonial violence and subjugation as the continuation of the struggle for existence. Firmin quotes directly from Royer’s preface to her translation of the Origin of Species, which sets out to demonstrate that racial and social inequality are grounded in the process of natural selection: The data on which rests the theory of natural selection can no longer leave any doubt that superior races emerged in succession and that, consistently with the law of progress, these superior races are destined to supplant the inferior ones, progressing even further while avoiding metissages [croisements] which are likely to lower the average level of the species.58 In Royer’s account, there is a single trajectory of progress which is the province of the race that emerged victorious in the struggle for existence. This race has free licence to subjugate, enslave and exterminate others. Uniformity is imposed through violence sanctioned by natural law, which retains its applicability throughout human historical development.

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  183 In the face of this narrow reading of Darwin which stresses conflict, Firmin offers an alternative account which accommodates greater of plurality.59 In Firmin’s assessment, the theory of natural selection far from supporting the inequality of the races, […] proves to the contrary that all the human races are inherently endowed with equal aptitudes. It shows that only the accessory influences of environment or heredity explain the difference in the development of each ethnic group in the relatively short historical evolution of the entire species.60 Although he identifies heredity causes for developmental inequalities between societies, these are ‘accessory’ and can be overcome. Natural selection for Firmin provides an impetus for development, but it is embedded within a more universalist account of potentiality. The same conditions pertain in all locales, meaning that all races have the same capacity for development. As Firmin puts it, humanity is not composed of superior and inferior races; under similar circumstances and at any given juncture in their social evolution, all peoples are able to accomplish heroic actions and create admirable works which bring them glory in the present and immortality in the future.61 Evolution is not played out according to a struggle for existence; it allows the coexistence of numerous developmental strands. Hence natural selection cannot be invoked as a justification for colonialism. In stressing harmonious coexistence over struggle, Firmin is closer to advocating the Comtean ideal of harmonious convergence. Indeed, positivist universalism would seem to offer the basis for according a place to Africa in world history independently of European ascendency. This is especially true if contrasted with the Hegelian model of history. Angèle Kremer-​Marietti provides a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history conceived as the movement of spirit from place to place, finally achieving consciousness in Germany. According to this analysis, Hegel cast different geo-​cultural eras, such as China, Persia and Greece, as fixed species of thought. By contrast for Comte, human universality is not heterogeneous, driven by a dynamism which shifts from one ‘people’ to another: it is a homogeneous universality to which each ‘race’ contributes in complimentary manner according to a dynamism which is common to all.62 As an emancipatory philosophy, Comtean positivism seemingly has more to offer than the Hegelian dialectic: ‘the ostracism of the Hegelian Spirit

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184  Matthew Carson Allen has its counterpart in the constituent action of the positive spirit, which tends fundamentally to integration’.63 Nonetheless, the ‘integrative’ tendency of Comtean positivism runs the risk of assuming that unity is to be achieved through the effacement of difference, although this is not stated in as violent terms as the social Darwinist position. By contrast, the Hegelian philosophy of history had the merit of preserving difference as an integral category, a potentiality to which Firmin has recourse. Indeed, the work of Comte presents certain difficulties, particularly from the point of view of Firmin’s project. Specifically, Comte’s treatment of race was highly essentialist. Comte mapped the three stages of scientific enquiry onto the principle human races, conventionally held to be three in number: the ‘white race’ is speculative and monotheistic, the ‘yellow race’ active and polytheistic, and the ‘black race’ affective and fetishistic.64 In Comte’s view, the Black contribution to a future society was highly circumscribed and was dependent of his view of Africa as lying outside the currents of history. There is no place for historical Black civilization, and beyond providing a stimulus to reintegrate the emotions and develop solidarity necessary to bringing about the positivist stage, Blacks retain no distinctiveness in Comte’s projected harmonious future. Firmin provides an alternative account of the apotheosis of history. He identifies the Black contribution to the future world historical synthesis not in a racially determined worldview, but in historical experience: The Negro race, which has been martyred, scorned, discriminated against, brutalized, and systematically exterminated, would be justified to feel righteous anger and to dream of crushing its persecutors ant its former oppressors. But its generosity will prevail, for the more one has suffered, the more one is prepared to understand and exercise justice.65 Firmin eschews essentialism, locating the specificity of Black experience in history rather than biology. In Firmin’s account, the collective memory of suffering will not be effaced by increased global uniformity. Thus, even when history’s consummate synthesis is to be achieved, cultural specificity is maintained and difference is not dissolved. Moreover, Firmin stops short of Comte’s view that racial difference itself will eventually disappear once the various races begin working together for the common betterment of humanity.66 Comte declared the concept of racial difference to be irrational because it describes phenomena that in reality are contingent, arising from ‘des influences locales’.67 For Firmin, racial difference is never wholly effaced under a universalized concept of humanity. While projecting his vision of future world harmony, Firmin states that

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  185 once they acknowledge they are all equal, the races will be able to support and love one another. While they have generally the same abilities, each one will develop certain exquisite qualities of the heart, the mind, and the body in response to the stimuli of their respective milieus. Inevitably, then, the races will always need to complement one another if they are to live, develop, and flourish in their own environments [sous les latitudes qui leur sont propres].68 The influence of Broca’s polygenesis is evident in Firmin’s sense that geography provides the parameters for the separate, parallel development of civilization among distinct races. If the strength of Comtean positivism was its emphasis on the unerring action of laws, its weakness was in failing to apply this uniformly over and above racial difference. Paradoxically, where it did try to be uniform, it effaced racial difference. Firmin’s solution took the form of a synthesis of the polygenetic concept of separate independent emergence, combined with the uniform and universal application of laws of development. Accordingly there are no poorly adapted races; races are equally well adapted to whichever environment they find themselves. This explains Firmin’s alternation between the terms ‘peuple’ for ‘race’ to imply different concepts of adaptation when writing that ‘it is impossible to find a people [un peuple] of any race that has ever developed higher aptitudes for civilization under conditions which are harmful or unfavourable to human culture’.69 Firmin conceived of progress as resulting from a given society’s capacity to adapt to the parameters set by the environment. Progress has the potential to be realized everywhere, appearing under numerous different guises. However, in emphasizing geography and environment to this extent, Firmin perhaps overlooked the history of conquest and colonization as factors giving rise to inequality. This may represent an intrinsic limitation of the positivist developmental paradigm which was so central to Firmin’s analysis. Firmin’s modifications of positivism lay in universalizing the potential for development across all races. Nonetheless, even this positivist concept of cumulative unilinear growth poses certain problems, in particular when it comes to approaching the history of Africa. Firmin is obliged to modify the positivist account in order to accord greater space to African civilization in world history. One of Firmin’s central aims in De l’égalité was staking the claim that ancient Egyptian civilization was Black African, rather than Hellenic. This endeavor ‘to shift the geography of reason [...] and decenter the Westernization of epistemology and human history’ makes him an early forerunner of such eminent thinkers as Cheikh Anta Diop.70 The positivist doctrine of unidirectional progress would seem to rule out the possibility of advanced civilisation being achieved in Africa and then disappearing. Yet this is precisely the claim that Firmin makes, while in so doing articulating a problem:

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186  Matthew Carson Allen if we admit that the ancient Egyptians were Black, as the available evidence allows us to suppose, how do we explain the degradation in which their congeners or their descendants have fallen, to the point where they have allowed to disappear the ancient civilization which flourished with such exuberance on the banks of the Nile?71 Given this state of affairs, the logical conclusion one could draw would be that the modern successors of the ancient Egyptians are the white Europeans. This is a view apparently sanctioned by observation of ‘the state of profound degradation of Africans [contrasted] with the current status of Europeans’.72 Positivism assumes development is cumulative, and without a mechanism that allows for retrograde evolution, it is impossible to counter the argument that Africa’s present underdevelopment is evidence of things always having been so. Hence, faced with the demands of his ‘théorie évolutionniste’, Firmin is forced to introduce another mechanism: we should also remember that while there are influences which trigger a progressive selection [une sélection progressive], there are also others which bring about regressive selection [des transformations régressives], both material and moral. Instead of an evolution, what occurs is a painful revolution [une révolution pénible]; instead of progress, there is regression [au lieu de marcher en avant, on retrograde]. These are observable facts, in the realms of both natural selection and social selection.73 In the case of Egypt, Firmin attributes the downfall of civilisation to unforeseen external factors: ‘invasion by less advanced peoples and by a foreign race impeded then destroyed Egyptian civilization by blocking the rise of the Ethiopian world toward a more advanced level of civilization’.74 Contingent factors undercut the positivist view of progress, casting doubt on the validity of Comte’s ‘commitment to the concept of continuity, which was essential to his view of progress’.75 In according greater prominence to randomness and chaos, Firmin takes up positions similar to Hegel, who had incorporated downfall and collapse as an integral part of civilisation, and whose duality of matter and spirit allowed for the possibility for a separate category of historical occurrences that do not contribute to the unfolding of spirit. As he writes of Persia in the Philosophy of History, ‘we must here banish from our minds the prejudice in favour of duration, as if it had any advantage as compared with transience’.76 Bernasconi presents the two thinkers as antagonistic, with Firmin departing markedly from Hegel through his ‘expansion of the dramatis personae of history so as to include the black race, which Hegel had explicitly excluded’.77 Nonetheless, the conception of historical process, in which at a given moment one people takes on a providential role in the unfolding of spirit, is mirrored in Firmin’s account

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  187 by the mission his homeland is to fulfil in the future: ‘Haiti must serve to the rehabilitation of Africa’.78

Firmin’s Emergent Theory of Uniform Change Firmin’s revision to positivism consisted in generalizing the principle of historical law in order to allow a greater variety of actors onto the stage of history. A theory of historical development emerges over the course of De l’égalité, both in Firmin’s overt statements and via his interventions into debates within various fields. The theory posits the separate emergence of cultures, thus eroding the assumption that cultures spread out via diffusion from a select few sources. Firmin was one of a number of scholars seeking to abandon the use of genealogical models of descent to explain inherited traits. This development played out in a number of scholarly disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century, as Firmin observes. Chief among these were linguistics and Darwinian evolutionary biology, which shared the use the family tree as an explanatory model. Linguists used this model to group languages according to common traits inherited from a restricted number of initial proto-​languages. The most illustrious example of this was the Indo-​European family of languages, known to science since the start of the nineteenth century and popularized through the work of such public intellectuals as Friedrich Max Müller. Yet emerging generations of linguistics, chiefly W.D. Whitney, were becoming vocal in their opposition to the view that linguistic evolution and biological evolution correlated. This position was held by Müller and the comparatist August Schleicher, the latter invoking evolutionary causality to claim that ‘languages, like living species, undergo continuous development, gradually diversify, and can be classified genealogically’.79 Whitney opposed this with the view that language was a human institution; that linguistic change occurred not through the action of unconscious biological factors but in the gradual shift of linguistic habits arising from social interaction between individuals.80 This was useful to opposing the view that individual languages, because they share their origin with the race that speaks them, encode a specific mentality and worldview that is then passed on genetically down the generations. Firmin observes a disruption of taxonomic schemes in the science of language that is analogous to the uniformitarianism implied by Broca’s polygenism. Previous generations of linguists had divided languages into families and classified them in a hierarchy according to their predominant morphology; isolating, agglutinative or inflexional. As Firmin suggests, it was difficult not to correlate these with divisions of race: does not this division seem to correspond to the division of the human species into three major races, namely, the yellow, black, and white races? Such a coincidence was bound to attract the attention

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188  Matthew Carson Allen of ethnologists, who soon wondered whether certain human groups were not better suited to use a specific language rather than another.81 Once again, empirical observation is on closer inspection guided by bias. With great rhetorical flourish, he likens the endeavour of linguistics to construct an Indo-​European family tree to a Procrustean bed into which nations and languages had to be made to fit by hook or by crook. You cut off the head of this one, you removed a prefix from that one, you attached false legs to this one, you added a suffix to that one, and there you were. The whole body of the thing was mangled and it limped along, but there was an overwhelming aura of glory about it.82 However, Firmin was also aware of the work of new scholars of linguistics who were challenging the paradigm of comparative linguistics. With his habitual thoroughness in establishing the origin and development of scholarly ideas, Firmin traces the history of linguistics from the start of his century. The story begins with Franz Bopp, whose formulation of ‘phonetic laws’ facilitated the reconstruction of past states of language, an avenue of enquiry pursued by Max Müller and Ernest Renan among others.83 Müller’s interest in linguistic roots formed the basis of a theory of language evolution whereby the variety of modern languages can be traced back to a set of original roots (‘the roots [radicaux] considered the primitive elements of the language’, as Firmin puts it) which develop over time out of their initial embryonic state.84 This core stock of roots is finite (‘usually in limited numbers in a particular language’). These radicals came to be treated as the attributes specific to individual families of languages and in turn races.85 Having sketched the history of comparative linguistics across the nineteenth century, Firmin introduces the work of a recent critic. Hitherto a view had prevailed, first articulated by Jacob Grimm, according to which ‘languages develop organically, their structure and composition growing in complexity’, which begins with ‘primitive’ monosyllabic languages, followed by agglutinating ones—​a middling position occupied by African languages—​and finishes with the perfection of inflectional Indo-​European languages.86 Firmin criticizes this position on the basis that these divisions seldom correspond to divisions of race. Several pages further on, he cites a notable critic of static hierarchies: the American linguist William Dwight Whitney. When Firmin was writing, Whitney was engaged in a heated debate with Max Müller, which continued for many years after the publication De l’égalité. The debate centred on the precise function played by roots at the origin of language. Müller held roots to be the linguistic embodiment of primitive mental concepts, whereas Whitney and his side of the debate viewed them simply as pragmatic oral utterances whose meaning derived purely from context.87 Whitney also rejected Müller’s

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  189 view that human speech developed in a fatalistic way beyond human will, arguing instead that its origins were in human activity.88 This position is in keeping with Firmin’s division between human society and the state of nature. Most significantly Firmin invokes Whitney in support of his thesis that each of the major groupings—​ monosyllabic, agglutinative, and inflectional seems to follow its own evolutionary pattern, and in the course of its evolution it may acquire a near perfect configuration, that is, one that approximates our conception of the ideal human language.89 Accordingly, the genetic descent of a given language was subordinated to the pragmatic use made of the language by a given society, adapting it to the needs of modernity. One striking instance of this that is highlighted by Whitney is Chinese which, owing to its monosyllabic morphology, would be assigned a lowly position in the hierarchy of classification. Firmin renders the following passage from Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language (1867) in French: The power which the human mind has over its instruments, and independent of their imperfections, is strikingly illustrated by the history of this form of speech, which has successfully answered all the purposes of a cultivated, reflecting, studious, and ingenious people throughout a career of unequalled duration; which has been put to far higher and more varied uses than most of the multitude of highly organized dialects spoken among men-​-d ​ ialects rich in flexibility, adaptiveness, and power of expansion, but poor in the mental poverty and weakness of those who should wield them.90 Whitney treats language not as an outgrowth of organic development, but as a tool in the hands of society. Severing the tie between language and race served Firmin’s interests in claiming a place for the French language in Haiti against the charge of derivative mimicry. In his final work, Lettres de Saint-​Thomas (1910), Firmin affirms that the French language, ‘this language of the heart allied with reason [ce langage du cœur uni à la raison]’, is inherently suited to the intellectual development of Haiti owing to its suppleness and use as a vehicle for universalist humanist ideals.91

Conclusion Firmin’s critical reading of the work of Comte reveals his ability to engage with disparate theories from numerous disciplines and adapt them to serve his purposes. His sources are eclectic, ranging from a polygenetic evolutionary account that was declining in influence, as well as the

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190  Matthew Carson Allen most up-​to-​the-​minute debates in the sciences of language. Nonetheless a coherent thesis emerges: historical process obeys certain laws which are so fundamental and general in their applicability that they allow for the independent emergence of analogous phenomena. This unseats the diffusionist model according to which cultural and intellectual forms have a single point of origin, associated with a privileged race. Combined with his awareness of contingent factors which introduce complexity to providential narratives, Firmin is able, in De l’égalité, to innovate a philosophy of history that does justice to the place of Haiti in the world. Specifically, it allows him to make the case for Haiti’s capacity to continue its intellectual and economic development independently of foreign interference, while avoiding the charge of mimicry. In his words, Haiti is ‘a small nation that has never benefited from the protection of any civilized power but that, to the contrary, has always had to contend with internal and external difficulties’, but in which ‘we see the Black man exhibit his intelligence in all its brilliance and successfully tackle every branch of knowledge’.92

Notes 1 Robert Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a philosopher against racism,’ Patterns of Prejudice 44, issue 4–​5 (2008): 383. 2 Anténor Firmin, The Equality of Human Races (positivist anthropology), trans. Asselin Charles (New  York and London: Garland, 2000), liv; original citation in Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (Paris: Cotillon, 1885), ix. 3 Gertrud Lenzer, ‘Introduction: Auguste Comte and modern positivism’, in Auguste Comte and Positivism, ed. Lenzer (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction, 2010), lxxv. 4 Indeed, Bernasconi has characterised Firmin’s intervention as ‘upholding true positivism against both the scientific materialists and the false representatives of positivism in the Société’, Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 371. 5 Mary Pickering, ‘Auguste Comte and the return to primitivism’, Revue internationale de philosophie 52, no. 203(1) (1998): 53. 6 Warren Schmaus, ‘A reappraisal of Comte’s Three-​State Law’, History and theory 21, no. 2 (1982): 261. 7 Pickering, ‘Auguste Comte’, 57. 8 Murray L.  Wax, ‘On negating Positivism: an anthropological dialectic’, American Anthropologist, New Series 99, no. 1: 17. 9 Firmin, Equality, 10; De l’égalité, 15. Lewis R. Gordon reads this passage as a criticism of his contemporaries’ ‘effort to articulate a great distance between the Caucasian and the Negro, to advance a theory of species differentiation instead of racial differentiation’. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 61. 10 Firmin, Equality, 11; De l’égalité, 16. 11 Lenzer, ‘Introduction’, lxxi. 12 Ibid., lxxii. 13 Firmin, Equality, 12; De l’égalité, 18.

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  191 14 Firmin, Equality, 12–​13; De l’égalité, 18. Also quoted by Carolyn Fluehr-​ Lobban, ‘Anténor Firmin: Haitian pioneer of anthropology’. American anthropologist 102, no. 3 (September 2000): 452. 15 Firmin, Equality, 13; De l’égalité, 19. 16 Firmin, Equality, 167; De l’égalité, 248. Also quoted by Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 372. 17 Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité, vol. 1, (Paris: L. Mathias, 1851), 390; quoted by Tzvetan Todorov, On Human diversity: nationalism, racism and exoticism in French thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27. 18 Firmin, Equality, 450; De l’égalité, 662. 19 Firmin, Equality, 285–​6; De l’égalité, 424. 20 Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris,’ 380–​1. Cf. Camisha Russell, ‘Positivism and progress in Firmin’s Equality of the Human Races’, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 53. 21 Joy Harvey, ‘Evolutionism transformed: positivists and materialists in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris from Second Empire to Third Republic’, in The wider domain of evolutionary thought, ed. D. Olroyd and I. Langham (Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel: 1983), 289. cf. Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 367. 22 Daniel N.  Livingstone, Adam’s ancestors: race, religion, and the politics of human origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 119. 23 Francis Schiller, Paul Broca: founder of French anthropology, explorer of the brain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979), 139. 24 Firmin, Equality, 77; De l’égalité, 115. 25 Firmin, Equality, 80; De l’égalité, 120. 26 Firmin, Equality, 81; De l’égalité, 121. 27 Cf. Harvey, ‘Evolutionism transformed’, 291. 28 Russell, ‘Positivism and progress’, 55. 29 Linda L.  Clark, Social Darwinism in France (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 18. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Jean-​Claude Wartelle, ‘La Société d’anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920’, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 1, no. 10 (2004), 128 and 131. 32 Harvey, ‘Evolutionism transformed’, 299–​303. 33 Firmin, Equality, 153; De l’égalité, 225. 34 Firmin, De l’égalité, 488, 242 and 175 respectively. 35 Auguste Comte. The essential Comte: selected from Cours de philosophie positive. Edited by Stanislav Andreski, translated by Margaret Clarke (London: Croom Helm; New  York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1974), 180. First published Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, vol. 4 (Paris: Bachelier, 1839), 417. 36 Lenzer, ‘Introduction,’ lxxv–​lxxvi. 37 Schmaus, ‘A reappraisal’, 254. 38 Firmin, Equality, 35; De l’égalité, 48. 39 Firmin, Equality, 141; De l’égalité, 206. 40 Firmin, Equality, 414; De l’égalité, 614. 41 Firmin, Equality, 37–​8; De l’égalité, 51; cf. Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’,  368–​9.

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192  Matthew Carson Allen 2 Firmin, Equality, 77–​8; De l’égalité, 115. 4 43 Firmin Equality, 141; De l’égalité, 206, quoting Paul Broca, Mémoires d’anthropologie, vol. 3 (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1877), 566. 44 Firmin, Equality, 78; De l’égalité, 116. 45 Ibid. 46 Firmin, Equality, 187; De l’égalité, 277. 47 Harvey, ‘Evolutionism transformed’, 289. 48 Firmin, Equality, 77; De l’égalité, 115. 49 Firmin, Equality, 79–​80; De l’égalité, 118. 50 Harvey, ‘Evolutionism transformed’, 296. 51 Andrew Lang, Custom and myth (London: Longmans, Green, 1884), 21–​2. 52 Todorov, On human diversity, 27. 53 ‘Comte’s vision was in fact largely limited to the white race, and his conception of civilization, though in principle universally human, was in practice Europocentric’. George W. Stocking Jr. Victorian anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 29. 54 Firmin, Equality, 273; De l’égalité, 402. 55 Firmin, Equality, 274; De l’égalité, 405. 56 Firmin, Equality, 279; De l’égalité, 412. 57 Firmin, Equality, 280; De l’égalité, 413. 58 From Royer’s ‘Préface’ to the first edition of her translation of Charles Darwin, De l’origine des espèces par sélection naturelle, ou des lois de transformation des êtres organises, third edition (Paris: Victor Masson et fils, 1870), lxix; as quoted by Firmin, Equality, 271 ; De l’égalité, 399. 59 Bernasconi has characterized Firmin’s reading of Darwin as an attempt ‘subtract the more vicious aspects of social Darwinism from the theory of evolution’, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 376. 60 Firmin, Equality, 272; De l’égalité, 401. 61 Firmin, Equality, 267; De l’égalité, 394. 62 Angèle Kremer-​Marietti, Entre le signe et l’histoire: l’anthropologie positiviste d’Auguste Comte (Paris: Kliencksieck, 1982), 134. 63 Ibid., 134. 64 Ibid., 132–​3; cf. Pickering ‘Auguste Comte’, 68 and Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 378. 65 Firmin, Equality, 446; De l’égalité,  655–​6. 66 Pickering, ‘Auguste Comte’, 73. 67 Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité, vol. 2 (Paris: L. Mathias, 1851), 449. Passage referred to by Pickering 1998 p. 73 f. 81. 68 Firmin, Equality, 449; De l’égalité, 659. 69 Firmin, Equality, 275; De l’égalité, 405. 70 Celucien L.  Joseph, ‘Anténor Firmin, the “Egyptian Question”, and Afrocentric imagination’, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014): 154 and passim for a discussion of Firmin’s place within the canon of critical Afrocentric Egyptology. 71 Firmin, Equality, 288; De l’égalité, 428. 72 Firmin, Equality, 288; De l’égalité, 429. 73 Firmin, Equality, 288–​9; De l’égalité, 429; cf. Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 378, who renders Firmin’s ‘transformations régressives’ as ‘regressive transformations’.

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Firmin and Laws of Multilineal Evolution  193 4 Firmin, Equality, 289; De l’égalité, 429. 7 75 Pickering ‘Auguste Comte’, 62. Cf. Russell ‘Positivism and progress’, 56–​8 for another account of Firmin’s divergence from the single temporal horizon of positivism. 76 G.W.F. Hegel, The philosophy of history (New  York: Dover, 1956), 221 [1837]. 77 Bernasconi, ‘A Haitian in Paris’, 382. 78 Firmin, Equality, lvi; De l’égalité, xiii. 79 Stephen G.  Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 129. 80 Cf. Alter, William Dwight Whitney,  130–​5. 81 Firmin, Equality, 120; De l’égalité, 176. 82 Firmin, Equality, 258; De l’égalité,  378–​9. 83 Firmin, Equality, 123; De l’égalité,  181–​2. 84 Firmin, Equality, 124; De l’égalité, 183. 85 Ibid. 86 Firmin, Equality, 127; De l’égalité, 188. 87 Gillian Cawthra, ‘Thought and language: the debate in the later nineteenth century,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88, no.1 (1987): 40–​1. 88 Ernst Cassirer, ‘Structuralism in modern linguistics’, Word 1, no.  2 (1945): 111. 89 Firmin, Equality, 130; De l’égalité, 193. 90 William Dwight Whitney, Language and the study of language: twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science (London: N. Trübner, 1867), 336, quoted in French by Firmin, De l’égalité, 193. 91 Anténor Firmin, Lettres de Saint-​Thomas. Etudes sociologiques, historiques et littéraires (Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1910), 92. 92 Firmin, Equality, 296; De l’égalité, 438.

Bibliography Alter, Stephen G. William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Bernasconi, Robert. ‘A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a philosopher against racism’. Patterns of Prejudice 44, issue 4–​5 (2008): 365–​383. Broca, Paul. Mémoires d’anthropologie. vol. 3. Paris: C. Reinwald, 1877. Cassirer, Ernst. ‘Structuralism in modern linguistics’. Word 1, no. 2 (1945): 99–​120. Cawthra, Gillian. ‘Thought and language: the debate in the later nineteenth century’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88, no. 1 (1987): 38–​47. Clark, Linda L. Social Darwinism in France. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Comte, Auguste. Cours de philosophie positive, vol. 4. Paris: Bachelier, 1839. Comte, Auguste. Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité. 4 vols. Paris: L. Mathias, 1851. Comte, Auguste. The Essential Comte: selected from Cours de philosophie positive. Edited by Stanislav Andreski, translated by Margaret Clarke. London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1974. Darwin, Charles. De l’origine des espèces par sélection naturelle, ou des lois de transformation des êtres organisés. Translated and prefaced by Clémence Royer. Paris: Victor Masson et fils, 1870 [1859].

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194  Matthew Carson Allen Firmin, Anténor. De l’égalité des races humaines. Anthropologie positive. Paris: Librairie Cotillon, 1885. Firmin, Anténor. Lettres de Saint-​Thomas. Etudes sociologiques, historiques et littéraires. Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1910. Firmin, Anténor. The Equality of Human Races (positivist anthropology). Translated by Asselin Charles. New  York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. Fluehr-​ Lobban, Carolyn. ‘Anténor Firmin: Haitian pioneer of anthropology’. American anthropologist 102, no. 3 (September 2000): 449–​466. Gordon, Lewis R. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Harvey, Joy. ‘Evolutionism transformed: positivists and materialists in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris from Second Empire to Third Republic’. In The Wider domain of evolutionary thought, edited by D. Olroyd and I. Langham, 289–​310. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel, 1983. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of history. Translated by J. Sibree. New  York: Dover, 1956 [1837]. Joseph, Celucien L. ‘Anténor Firmin, the “Egyptian Question”, and Afrocentric Imagination’. Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 7 no. 2 (August 2014): 127–​174. Kremer-​Marietti, Angèle. Entre le signe et l’histoire: l’anthropologie positiviste d’Auguste Comte. Paris: Kliencksieck, 1982. Lang, Andrew. Custom and myth. London: Longmans, Green, 1884. Lenzer, Gertrud. ‘Introduction: Auguste Comte and Modern Positivism’. In Auguste Comte and Positivism, edited by Gertrud Lenzer, xi–​lxxxii. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers. Livingstone, Daniel N. Adam’s ancestors: race, religion, and the politics of human origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pickering, Mary. ‘Auguste Comte and the return to primitivism’. Revue internationale de philosophie 52, no. 203(1) (1998): 51–​77. Russell, Camisha. ‘Positivism and progress in Firmin’s Equality of the Human Races’. Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 2 (August 2014):  45–​67. Schiller, Francis. Paul Broca: Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979. Schmaus, Warren. ‘A reappraisal of Comte’s Three-​ State Law’. History and theory 21, no. 2 (1982): 248–​266. Stocking, George W. Jr. Victorian anthropology. New York: The Free Press, 1987. Todorov, Tzvetan. On human diversity: nationalism, racism and exoticism in French thought. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994. Wartelle, Jean-​Claude. ‘La Société d’anthropologie de Paris de 1859 à 1920’. Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 1, no. 10 (2004): 125–​171. Wax, Murray L. ‘On negating Positivism: an anthropological dialectic’. American Anthropologist, New Series 99, no. 1: 17–​23. Whitney, William Dwight. Language and the study of language: twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science. London: N. Trübner, 1867.

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10  Reconstructing the Universality of the Social Sciences and Humanities Anténor Firmin and Black (Haitian) Atlantic Thought and Culture Paul C. Mocombe

Introduction Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–​ 1911) was born in Le Cap, Haiti, in 1850. Schooled in Haiti and Paris, in 1885, the nineteenth-​ century Haitian lawyer, statesman, anti-​racist intellectual, anthropologist, and Egyptologist published his magisterial text, De l’égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive) (The Equality of the Human Races) in Paris in the form of an impassioned “scientific rebuttal” to Arthur de Gobineau’s scientific racism and, particularly, against his central thesis of the ontological superiority of the Aryan-​White race and the ontological inferiority of the Black race. Although Firmin challenged Western nineteenth-​century racist attitudes toward Blacks by pointing to the African contribution to Egyptian and Western civilizations, he was not an Afrocentric in the sense of the ethnological, négritude, noiriste, and contemporary Afrocentric movements of the twentieth century, which viewed African culture and civilizations as different and unique from European ones based on race and culture. The latter theorists asserted and assert that members of the black race shared a common psychology (acquired or innate), that their social mores were different from those of whites, that they should therefore cease to accept European standards and should develop a specifically African way of living. (Nicholls, 1979, pg. 2) Firmin, conversely, posited that the various human races were equal and differed in no important respect, and that the backwardness of the African race vis-​à-​vis whites was due to slavery and colonialism. He, therefore, wished to demonstrate, in his works and politics, the capacity of members of the Black race to achieve progress and to build a civilized community according to European standards, which he accepted as being of universal application (Nicholls, 1979; Firmin, 2002; Dubois, 2012).

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196  Paul C. Mocombe The purpose of this present chapter is twofold: first, I want to suggest, building on the works of David Nicholls (1979) and Laurent Dubois (2012), that in his anthropological work Firmin is a universalist. He was not proposing that people of African descent are different from whites or view the world differently from them, à la the Afrocentric’s and the noirisite’s position. On the contrary, his highlight of African contributions to civilization was to demonstrate their abilities, which are similar to whites who would build on, and continue, the universalist project of Egyptian/​Ethiopian civilizations via the universality of the Enlightenment project. Second, I want to continue Firmin’s position by demonstrating the African contribution to social and scientific theories by highlighting the scientism of the African people of Haiti as revealed by the religion of vodou, Haitian epistemology (Haitian/​Vilokan idealism), and their form of system and social integration, lakouism and the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, respectively (Mocombe, 2016). Essentially, like Firmin, I assume, against the noiriste and Afrocentric positions, science as a human universal, which began in Africa, and has now reached maturity in Western society. In this chapter, I seek to highlight the African/​Haitian contribution to the scientific process as encapsulated and revealed in Paul C. Mocombe’s (2018a) social theory and method of “phenomenological structuralism,” thereby reconstructing the universality of the social sciences and humanities to account for the contribution of Black (Haitian) Atlantic thought and culture, without any references to racial essentialism, which for me was the intent behind Firmin’s (2002) work, or reactionary logics of oppression as embodied in constructs such as “double consciousness,” Afrocentrism, noirisme, Black modernity, and so on.

Background of the Problem In his anthropological work, The Equality of the Human Races, Anténor Firmin sought to refute the support for the principle of racial inequality buttressed by prominent scholars from Immanuel Kant to Ernst Renan by highlighting the brilliance of African people and their contribution to civilizations (Firmin, 2002). According to Firmin, there was only one human race, “endowed with the same qualities and defects, without distinctions based on color or anatomical shape. The races are equal” (2002, pg. 450). The notion of the inequality of the human races, Firmin would go on to argue, was rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism as opposed to scientific fact (Dubois, 2012, pg. 183). As such, to demonstrate the equality of the Black race to whites, Firmin would go on to insist that Egyptian civilisation is the fountainhead from which sprang the Greek and Latin cultures, and that the development of the arts and sciences among white people of the West rested upon an African foundation.

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  197 Caucasian presumption, he observed, could not abide the idea that the whole development of human civilization originated with a race which they considered to be radically inferior to themselves. (Nicholls, 1979, pg. 130) Firmin, like his European counterparts, would go on to use personal accounts to further make his point (Dubois, 2012). Nonetheless, in spite of the less than scientific approach to the latter part of his work, Firmin would give rise to the negritude, Afrocentric, and American anthropological traditions of Franz Boaz, which sought to demonstrate the Africanisms found among African people in the diaspora and their contribution to the development of Western science (Nicholls, 1979; Dubois, 2012). For Firmin, like many Haitian writers of the nineteenth century, civilization (arts, culture, and science) had originated in Africa; however, slavery and colonialism had retarded African people and their progress, which gave rise to European civilizations. So, in essence Firmin does not question the universality of the scientific progress that European culture has made in the arts and sciences since at their base is African culture (Nicholls, 1979). He only questions its omission of the African contribution to that universal process, and debasement of its people (Firmin, 2002, pgs. 4–​5). I do not fundamentally disagree with Firmin’s thesis. I only reject the trajectory that the thesis has taken in the constitution of Afrocentric and noiriste theories emanating out of the adaptive-​vitality and pathological-​ pathogenic debates in the American and French anthropological traditions. That is to say, I accept the Firminian understanding that at the base of European civilization, culture, and progress is African (Egyptian/​ Ethiopian) civilization, and ultimately the European manifestation is at a level superior to anything found in Africa or Haiti, contemporarily, as a result of slavery and colonialism. However, I reject the racial essentialist viewpoint of many Afrocentrics and noiristes that the African mind, as a result of race, produced something other than the universalism purported by Western science. Like Firmin, I am a universalist and reject the correlation between race and scientific progress; all persons are “endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of colour or anatomic form. The races are equal; they are all capable of achieving the noblest intellectual development, as they are of falling into the most complete degradation.” Hence, for me, in keeping with the universalist and human essentialist logic of Firmin, the key is highlighting the contribution of African people to the universal project of Enlightenment scientific thought and progress as opposed to concocting and reifying a new racialist discourse guised in the pseudoscience of noirisme and Afrocentrism, which attempts to substantiate the position that members of the Black race shared a common psychology (acquired or innate) that gave rise to a distinct-​particular-​African worldview and science other than the scientism and civilization of the West. The latter position is retrograde. In my

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198  Paul C. Mocombe view, like Firmin, African people produced an original universal science that was interrupted by slavery and colonialism. The Greeks and Latins would build on its principles, which became the driving forces of the Enlightenment project of the West. Hence, in reconstructing the sciences and humanities to account for the African contribution, the aim is to highlight the parallels between the universal elements highlighted by African science and their further development in the West as opposed to reverting back to a retrograde position of reconstructing and reifying the particularism of the African worldview and interpellating and subjectifying Black people to that particularism under the pseudoscience of noirisme and Afrocentrism or reactionary theories of oppression highlighted by constructs such as double consciousness. The aim ought to be on reconstructing and reifying the universalism of the African worldview in order to further the scope of the scientific process as encapsulated in the principles reified in the West. Paul C. Mocombe’s phenomenological structuralism in the attempt to resolve the structure/​agency problematic of the social sciences by reverting back to Haitian epistemology, for me, captures that Firminian initiative more so than noirisme and Afrocentrism, which wants to reify and hold on to the particularism of the original African universalist project that contributed to and continues via the Enlightenment project of the Europeans.

Theory and Methods According to Paul C.  Mocombe (2017a, 2018a, 2019), his theory of phenomenological structuralism is a product of Haitian epistemological idealism, Haitian/​Vilokan idealism, which is a product of the demystification, demythologization, and rationalization of vodou metaphysics and physics as revealed in the evidence and logic of contemporary physics and social theory, that is, quantum mechanics, phenomenology, structurationism, materialism, and structural Marxism. Vodou is the religion and science of the African people of Haiti; the basis around which they organize their ethical worldviews, medicine, aesthetics, and form of system and social integration. It is out of the epistemological logic, a form of Haitian transcendental idealism and realism, of vodou, as it relates to contemporary quantum and social theory, that Mocombe would construct his phenomenological structural theory and methodology in order to resolve the structure/​agency problematic of the social sciences. Mocombe extrapolates what is universal from the African/​Haitian scientific position, vodou, and ties it to the universalism of the scientific project of the West in order to account for the African contribution to social theory and the sciences as opposed to relying on any references to racial essentialism (innate Black psychology) as found in noirisme and Afrocentrism. For the Africans, vodou is a monotheistic (scientific) religion in which the one God, Bon-​dye, or Gran-​Mét, the primeval pan-​psychic field, is

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  199 an energy force that gave rise to a sacred, cosmic, and geometrical world out of itself. Everything that is the world, universe, galaxies, animate and inanimate objects, and so on are a manifestation of Bon-​dye, and are sacred. Bon-​dye is spacetime, and the human being is no different from any other creation that is a part of this being. The aim of the human individual is to maintain balance, harmony, and perfection between nature/​ God, the geometric laws of creation, the cosmic forces (which aided Bon-​ dye in creating the multiverse), the community, and the individual. Out of Bon-​dye, the geometric laws of creation and the cosmic forces (lwa Legba, Gede, Zaka, Damballah, and Ezili) were created to assist Bon-​dye in creating the multiverse and habitable worlds (See Table 10.1). According to vodou mythology, one of Bon-​dye’s first creations when he fashioned the world was the sun (identified with the lwa, that is, concept, Legba in Haitian vodou metaphysics). Without its existence, lwa yo (concepts, ideas, and ideals by which humanity ought to recursively organize and reproduce their being-​in-​the-​world), human beings, and all the multiplicity of things could not exist. All derive from this primordial light. In vodou, the sun with which Legba is identified is a regenerative life force whose rays cause the vegetation to grow and ensure the maturation and sustenance of human life. Legba is the patron of the universe, the link between the Godhead and the universe, the umbilical cord that connects the universe to its origin. Bon-​dye fashioned the universe; Legba has nurtured it, has fostered its growth, and has sustained it. Legba is also said to be androgynous; hence, his vévé (artistic symbol) contains the symbol of his sexual completeness, and he is invoked in matters related to sex. He is the cosmic phallus. Both as phallus and as umbilical cord, Legba is the guarantor of the continuity of human generations. Just as Legba initiates time, so Gede ends time, for he is the master of Ginen who rules over death. In a sense, Gede is Legba’s opponent, for whereas Legba as the sun is omnipresent during the day, Gede is lord of the night and is symbolized by the moon. Whatever Legba conceives, Gede aborts; and whatever Legba sustains, Gede destroys, for he is the lord of death, the master of destruction of things. Although these two divine forces appear to have opposite functions, and indeed are inversions of each other, they nevertheless are similar in many ways, for both participate in the creative forces at opposite ends of the spectrum of life. Damballah, the gentle snake of the primal seas, is identified with eternal motion in the universe. This motion is characterized by the passage of all physical phenomena from birth to decay, and produces the physical displacement of objects in space and in time; manifests itself in the incessant motion of the waves of the ocean, the waters of springs and rivers; ensures the alternation of day and night; and impels the cyclical motion of the astral bodies. In short, Damballah is a living quality expressed in all dynamic motion in the cosmos; in all things that are flexible, sinuous, and moist; in all things that fold and unfold, coil and recoil. In humans, this energy force is the giver of children. It is

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200  Paul C. Mocombe identified not only with the eternal motion of human bodies but also with motion as seen in the cycle of life and death and in the passing of human generations. If motion is ensured by Damballah, and if, as generating principle, the phallus is symbolized by Legba and Gede, Ezili represents the cosmic womb in which divinity and humanity are conceived. She is the symbol of fecundity, the mother of the world who participates with the masculine forces in the creation and maintenance of the universe. As mother, Ezili cooperates with the sun, lwa Legba, who ensures the florescence and nurture of all living things. When she cooperates with Gede, she symbolizes Ginen’s cosmic womb from which the released ancestral gwo-​bon-​anjs are reclaimed. In combination with Damballah, Ezili guarantees the flow of human generations. Vodou mythology conceives her as the mother of the lwas and of humanity. She is believed to have given birth to the first human beings after Bon-​dye created the world. Ideologically in vodou, therefore, as in all other West African and Native American beliefs, the human being and all that is the universe is a manifestation of Bon-​dye and its cosmic forces. Within this Spinozaian pantheism, balance, harmony, perfection, and subsistence living with this Being as revealed in nature and its tilling, cultivation, and husbandry is the modus operandi for human existence. This one good God is an energy force that manifests itself in the human plane of existence via the ancestors and four hundred one lwa yo (transcendentally real concepts, cosmic forces, and animistic spirits materialized), which humans can access as a material energy force and (ideational) concepts to assist them in being-​in-​the-​world in order to maintain the aforementioned balance, harmony, perfection, and subsistence living of Bon-​dye. Hence, like the God of Judaism, the Good God, Bon-​dye Bon, of vodou is active in history and in current political events, via ancestors, lwa yo, and humans, rather than in the primordial sacred time of myth. Unlike the God of Judaism, however, in vodou human beings are not distinct, fallen, from that great energy force due to sin and must, therefore, seek to reunite with it by exercising good moral conduct on earth. In the pantheistic worldview of vodou, the human being, like all other beings, whether sentient or not, is a manifestation of the energy force of Bon-​dye. In other words, the human being is a spirit or energy force living in a material body or physical temple. We are constituted energy, which is recycled or reincarnated sixteen times, eight times as a male and eight times as a female, on the planet Earth in order to achieve perfection (Beauvoir, 2006). There is no moral right or wrong in vodou. “Followers define moral principles for themselves and are guided by life’s lessons, the wisdom of ancestors, and communication with spirits” (Michel, 2006, pg. 34). The aim is the manifestation of the power of Bon-​dye among the planes of human existence. As such, the energy, which constitutes the human being, is not punished for acts done in the material world through the descent into animal embodiment as highlighted in the reincarnation

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  201 logic of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The emphasis in vodou is on experiencing the lived world, subsistence living, and perfection. The closer the human being gets to their sixteenth experiences on earth and perfection, the wiser and less materialist they are (which is different from the Protestant ethic, which emphasizes material wealth as a sign of God’s grace and predestination). At the end of their sixteenth life cycle, once they have embodied and lived out all of the transcendentally real concepts of god, the energy that constitutes the human being is reabsorbed with the original energy force, Bon-​dye, the primeval pan-​psychic field, which manifested them as life. In sum, vodou is a manifestation of the Egyptian/​Ethiopian mystery system, les mystere. “The entire hieroglyphic system of Egypt is based upon the symbolic connection which exists between the various beings [of the world] and the cosmic forces, between the beings and the lois [(lwa in Kreyol)] (laws of creation)” (Rigaud, 1985, pg. 11). The vodou belief system posits that Bon-​dye, God, is the architect of our universe and its parallel-​mirrored world (that is Vilokan, where the forms by which we ought to live are outlined), which was created via geometric laws of creation and cosmic forces. The “laws of creation” create the cosmic forces and other lwa yo in visible manifestations such as the planets, suns, plants, animals, and human beings within geometric spacetime. The vodou rites are derived from the cosmic forces of the planets and suns created by the geometric laws of creation, which are recreated via the ideological apparatuses, that is, peristyles, dances, songs, musical instruments, magic and rituals, vévés, alters, and so on, of human beings. From the cosmic forces of the planets and suns, plants, animals, and human beings were created within geometric spacetime. Nature, the ideological apparatuses, that is, symbols, musical instruments, lakous, peristyles, and ounfo of human beings, and their practical consciousness must correspond to these geometric laws of creation and the cosmic forces. As such, human beings recreate this creation via the lakous (form of system integration), ounfo, peristyles, vévés, magic and rituals, personal altars (pe) to the cosmic forces and ancestors, herbal medicine, agricultural production, husbandry, and komes, which in total capture that creation and how humans ought to live within it in order to ensure balance and harmony between the noumenal/​Vilokan (sacred) world of vodou and the phenomenal (profane) one of human existence. As Gerdés Fleurant (2006) highlights, [t]‌he primary unit of Vodun social organization is the lakou (compound), and extended family and socioeconomic system whose center is the ounfo (temple), to which is attached the peristyle (the public dancing space). Vodun, a danced religion, acknowledges the unity of the universe in the continuity of Bondye, or God; the Lwa, or mediating spiritual entities; humans, animals; plants; and minerals. Vodun is also a family religion in the sense that its teachings, belief

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202  Paul C. Mocombe systems, and rituals are transmitted mainly through the structure of the family. It has a sacerdotal hierarchy comprised of the oungan (male) and the manbo (female) and their assistants, the laplas (sword bearer), ounsi kanzo (spouses of the spirits), oungenikon (chorus leader), and ountó (drummers). In the absence of priests, the head of the family, much like a traditional paterfamilias, conducts the service. Most ceremonies take place in the peristyle, whose potomitan (center post) is believed to incarnate ancestral and spiritual forces of family and community. The people dance around the potomitan, which is the point of genesis of essential segments of the ritual process. (pgs.  46–​47) The center post or potomitan of the peristyle is the solar support of the community that unites lwa yo, the earth, nature, sun, humans, plants, animals, and so on within one geometric spacetime: the peristyle forms geometrically the following 1)  the mitan, or center—​the non-​dimensional point; 2)  the rectangle, or lengthened square; 3) the circle; 4) the triangle; 5) the straight, horizontal line; 6)  the spiral; 7)  the curved, horizontal line; 8)  the round, vertical line; 9) the square, vertical line; 10) the perfect square; 11) the cross, or intersecting straight lines; 12) the equilateral and the isosceles triangle, formed by the beams which secure the post to the roof. (Rigaud, 1985, pg. 17) As Leslie G. Desmangles further highlights, The principle of inversion and retrogression is fundamental to Vodou theology as well as to its rituals […] In Vodou the relationship between the cosmic mirror and the profane reality that it represents takes the cosmographic form of the cross. In the cross, Vodouisants see not only the earth’s surface as comprehended by the four cardinal points of the universe, but also the intersection of the two worlds, the profane world as symbolized by the horizontal line, and Vilokan as represented by the vertical line […] The foot of this vertical line “plunges into the waters of the abyss” to the cosmic mirror where the lwas reside; there, in this sacred subtelluric city, is Africa (or Vilokan), the mythical home of Vodouisants, the place of the lwas’ origin, and Ginen, the abode of the living dead […] The point at which the two lines intersect is the pivotal “zero-​point” [(non-​dimensional point)] in the crossing of the two worlds. It is a point of contact at which profane existence, including time, stops, and sacred beings from Vilokan invade the peristil through the body of their possessed devotees. (pgs. 104–​105)

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  203 As such the peristyle, the structure within which vodou rituals and dances are performed, is a mirror reflection and ideological constitution of the universe and all of its forces from the moment of creation to the present: The four poles sustaining the structure symbolize mythologically the four cardinal points of the universe, covered by an overarching roof that represents the cosmic vault above the earth. Like the horizontal lines of the cross, the floor of the peristil symbolizes the profane world, while the vertical pole (potomitan) in the center of the peristil represents the axis mundi, the avenue of communication between the two worlds. Although the downward reach of the potomitan appears to be limited by the peristil’s floor, mythologically its foot is conceived to plunge into Vilokan, the cosmic mirror. The point at which the potomitan enters the peristil’s floor symbolizes the zero-​ point. During the ceremonies, the potomitan becomes charged with or “polluted” by the power of the lwas. Hence, before tracing the geometrical symbols of the lwas (vévés), the oungan or mambo may touch the pole, a ritual act that empowers him or her to summon the lwas into the peristil. Thereafter, like the potomitan, the oungan’s (or mambo’s) body becomes in itself the source of power, a repetition of the microcosmic symbol, a moving embodiment of the vertical axis around which the universe revolves. (Desmangles, 1992, pg. 105) Within the knowledge and functions of the cosmic forces and the geometric laws of creation oungan yo (priests), manbo yo (priestesses), bokor yo (sorcerers), and gangan yo/​dokté féy (doctors of herbal medicine), the power elites of vodou, can access lwa yo (animistic and cosmic spirits or forces) for wealth, healing, luck, and so on in a community based on living in harmony with nature and its laws and products of creation, which is expressed through music, dance, husbandry, tilling and cultivating the land (for medicinal and agricultural purposes), and komes for human sustenance and well-​being. The rites and ceremonies of vodou, “which can be seen as the reliving of the first act of creation when Bondye fashioned the world,” ensure the delicate balance and harmony between Bon-​dye, the cosmic forces, the geometric laws of creation, and human actions (Desmangles, 1992, pg., 152). Within the physics and metaphysics of this vodou system a distinct epistemology, Haitian transcendental idealism and realism, emerged. Haitian Epistemology and Haitian Idealism An authentic Haitian epistemology emerges out of the ever-​increasing demystification, demythologization, rationalization, and institutionalization (enchantment of the world) of the physical world around this spiritual belief system, Vilokan/​Vodou, of the African people of Haiti

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204  Paul C. Mocombe highlighted above. The Haitian epistemological position that would emerge out of the ontological worldview of the African people of Haiti and their form of system and social integration is a form of Kantian transcendental idealism and realism, which would be institutionalized (by manbos and oungans) throughout the provinces and mountains of the island (Mocombe, 2017, 2018). It (Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism) is both responsible for the epistemological anarchy of the profane (transcendentally ideal) phenomenal (material) world, and the sacred (universal—​ideational, but transcendentally real) noumenal (Vilokanic) world of vodou mysteries. Kantian transcendental idealism attempts to combine empirical realism, preserving the ordinary independence and reality of objects of the world, with transcendental idealism, which allows that in some sense the objects have their ordinary properties (their causal powers, and their spatial and temporal position) only because our minds are so structured that these are the categories we impose upon the manifold of experience. (Blackburn, 2008, pg. 356) Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism and realism, Haitian idealism or Vilokan idealism, is a form of transcendental idealism in the Kantian sense in that it attempts to synthesize empiricism and idealism (rationalism) via synthetic a priori concepts/​ideals, supplemented with trances, dream states, and extrasensory perceptions, the Haitians believe can be applied not only to the phenomenal but also the noumenal (Vilokanic) world in order to ascertain the latter’s (transcendentally real) absolute knowledges they call lwa, gods/​ goddesses (four hundred one concepts, ideas, and ideals represented as gods/​goddesses), of Vilokan/​Vodou. So, like Kant, Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism holds on to analytic truths, truths of reasons or definitions, as outlined in their proverbs (pwoveb); a posteriori truth, truths of experience or experiments, also embedded in their proverbs; geometry (veves), and herbal medicine; and synthetic a priori concepts (categories in Kantian epistemology supplemented with trances, dream states, extrasensory perceptions, and so on), truths stemming from the form of the understanding and sensibility of the mind and apparatuses of experience embedded not only in their proverbs but their vodou rituals, beliefs, and magics, which suggests that trances, dream states, and extrasensory perceptions allow access to things as they are in themselves. The latter (trances, dream states, extrasensory perceptions), in other words, are also categories of the understanding they believe can be applied to the noumenal or Vilokanic world in order to know gods/​goddesses, lwa yo, which are transcendentally real immutable/​absolute concepts, ideas, and ideals God has created and imposed upon and in the material world, from the mirrored world of the earth (Vilokan), which the people, who

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  205 embody these concepts, ideas, and ideals, should utilize to recursively reorganize and reproduce their being-​ in-​ and-​ as-​ the-​ world in order to achieve perfection over sixteen life cycles (Desmangles, 1992; Beauvoir, 2006). Hence, unlike Kantian idealism, which removes God from the equation via the categories, which impose the order we see in the phenomenal world, Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism and realism, Haitian/​Vilokan idealism, holds on to the concept of God, the supernatural, and the paranormal to continue to make sense of the plural tensions between the natural (material) world, that is, the world of phenomena, as our minds and senses structure our experiences of it, and the world as such, ideational, noumena, that is, the supernatural and paranormal world of Vilokan, which is knowable as truth claims, knowledge, and beliefs, through dreams, divinations, revelations, extrasensory perceptions, experience, reason and rationality, and the synthetic a prioris of Kant, for pure (development of science, that is, herbal medicine, and so forth) and practical reason (that is, morals and values). Thus, Haitian/​ Vilokan idealism, unlike Kantian transcendental idealism, implies that the transcendentally real objects, concepts, ideals, ideas, and so on of the (ideational) noumenal world are absolute and real, and the form of sensibilities and understandings, which include dream states, divinations, and extrasensory perceptions are other categories, which can be applied beyond the phenomenal world, where the objects are really subjective ideas, in order to ascertain the nature of the absolute concepts of the Vilokanic/​noumenal world, emanating from God’s mind, in order to achieve balance and harmony with it in the phenomenal. (See Table  10.1). Hence, unlike Kantian idealism, which removes God from the equation via the categories, which allows that in some sense the objects of the empirical world have their ordinary properties (their causal powers, and their spatial and temporal position) from the human mind and form of sensibilities, Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism and realism, Haitian/​Vilokan Idealism, holds on to the concept of God, the supernatural, and the paranormal to continue to make sense of the plural tensions between the natural (profane) world, that is, the world of phenomena, and the world as such, noumena, that is, the supernatural and paranormal world of Vilokan, which is knowable as truth claims, knowledge, and beliefs, through divinations, dreams, extrasensory perceptions, experience, reason and rationality, and the synthetic a priori, for pure (development of science, that is, herbal medicine, and so on) and practical reason (that is, morals and values). Within this pantheistic (Spinozaian) conception of the multiverse and material world, knowledge, truth claims, and beliefs arise from the transcendentally real objects and concepts (lwa yo) of Bon-​dye/​God as embedded in the earth’s mirrored world (Vilokan) and get deposited in our nanm (souls) intuitively, in dreams, extrasensory perceptions, divinations, sorcery, reason, rituals, and or experiences, which in turn constitute and structure the form of the understanding of our minds and

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206  Paul C. Mocombe bodies (senses) so that we can experience the material world according to our developmental track over sixteen reincarnated life cycles (Beauvoir, 2006; Mocombe, 2016, 2017, 2018). The human being internalizes and recursively (re) organizes and reproduces these transcendentally real concepts as their practical consciousness in the phenomenal (subjective) material world not always in their absolute (ideational) forms as defined noumenally (the sacred mirrored world of Vilokan), but according to their level of learning, development, capacity for knowledge, methods, and modality, that is, the way they know more profoundly—​kinesthetically, visually, and so on, once they are aggregated or embodied as a person. See Figure 10.1. As defined, Haitian epistemology is an epistemological transcendental idealism and realism, Haitian idealism or Vilokan idealism, that posits that both phenomenon (the profane world) and noumenon (its mirror image where wisdom, ideals, concepts, and ancestors reside) are knowable through dreams, sorcery, divinations, experience, and the form of human sensibility and understanding (reason), which stems from the energy force of a god, and is used to recursively (re)organize and reproduce their being-​ in-​and-​as-​the-​world. Ontologically speaking, in other words, within the Haitian metaphysical worldview, Vilokan/​Vodou, the world is a unitary (energy) material world created out of Bon-​dye. The world is a creation of a good God, Bon-​dye Bon, which created the world and humanity out of itself composed of two intersecting spheres, the profane (the phenomenal world) and the sacred (noumenal/​Vilokanic, mirrored world of the profane). Embedded in that pantheistic material world are concepts, transcendentally real ideals, lwa yo in Haitian metaphysics, from the parallel mirrored (Vilokanic) world, that humanity can ascertain via dreams, divinations, extrasensory perceptions, experience, and the structure of its being, form of understanding and sensibility, to help make sense of their experience and live in the world, which is Bon-​dye, and therefore sacred, as they seek perfection and reunification (reintegration) with God the energy force/​source. That is to say, it, Bon-​ dye, provided humanity with transcendentally real objects, concepts, ideas, ideals, and practices, that is, lwa of vodou, proverbs, rituals, dance, knowledge of herbal medicine, trades, and skills, by which they ought to know, interpret, and make sense of the (transcendentally ideal) external (phenomenal profane subjective) geometric/​cosmic world and live in it comfortably. These transcendentally real objects, concepts, ideas, ideals, and practices can be known through dreams, sorcery, divinations, experience, or rationality, and become the structure (categories) through which humanity comes to know and hold beliefs and truth claims, which emanate from the noumenal world. In addition, for humanity to constitute its existence and be in the world according to the will of God or Bon-​dye, in other words, objects and concepts, transcendentally real ideals, lwa yo, stemming from God’s will (the mirrored world of the profane, Vilokan), are embedded in the

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  207 material world, which is God, and can be ascertained and embodied by humanity via their constituted being as a material being with extrasensory perceptions, reason and rationality, and/​or through experience. As these concepts are ascertained, they are constituted and institutionalized, and passed on through humanity via priests and early ancestors who institutionalize (reify) them in the natural world via religious ceremonies, dance, symbols, rituals, herbal medicine, trades, concepts, and proverbs. These trades, ideals, dance, rituals, proverbs, and/​or concepts are truisms, mechanisms to ascertain and constitute knowledge, which although they are deduced from the constituted makeup (categories) of the human being, in Haitian metaphysics are attributed to God and the ancestors who institutionalized (reified) them in order to be applied in the material world so that their descendants can live freely in the world, satisfy their needs, be happy, and achieve perfection, to reunite with God after their sixteen life cycles (Beauvoir, 2006; Mocombe, 2016, 2017, 2018). Hence, Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism and realism (Haitian idealism, Vilokanism, Vodouism, or Vilokan idealism) is not only natural, but supernatural and paranormal to the extent that it supplements the synthetic a priori concepts Kant attributes to the categories of the mind with divinations, revelations, dream states, and extrasensory perceptions in order to ascertain the (transcendentally real) absolute concepts, ideals, ideas, and so on, (lwa) of God as embedded in the noumenal (Vilokanic) world, which can be internalized by the human subject as their practical consciousness over sixteen cycles of births and rebirths, after which they reintegrate into Bon-​dye where their essence can become concepts, ideas, and ideals, as in the case of Oungan Jean-​ Jacques Dessalines (the father of the Haitian nation) who, as the embodiment of the lwa Ogou Feray, concept of political warrior, became a lwa following his death (Beauvoir, 2006). (See Figure 10.1). Moreover, it posits that these absolute lwa yo, concepts, ideas, ideals, and so on, are part of the noumenal world (sacred world of Vilokan), which is not a plural world as plurality and relativity belong to the world of phenomena, and can eventually be known by extrasensory perceptions, human reason, understanding, and experience (supplemented categories to the Kantian categories). However, in the human sphere the (transcendentally ideal) world of phenomena and its plurality is a result of the different levels of development (reason, experience, capacity, and modality) of the human subjects (not all humans develop their form of sensibilities and understanding at the same rate or in the same life cycle). In addition to the twelve Kantian schematized categories of the understanding, divided into four groups of three (1. The axioms of intuition, that is, unity, plurality, and totality; 2.  The anticipations of perception, that is, reality, limitation, and negation; 3.  The postulates of empirical thought, that is, necessary, actual, and possible; 4. The analogies, that is, substance, cause, and reciprocity), necessary for experience by making objective space and time possible, Vilokanic/​Haitian idealism

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208  Paul C. Mocombe adds dream states, trances, and extrasensory perceptions as a fifth group of three to make the concepts, lwa yo, of the Vilokanic world knowable so that human actors can achieve balance between the phenomenal world and the former (Vilokanic/​noumenal) world. Thus, for Kant experience requires both the senses, the a priori forms of sensibility, that is, space and time, and the understanding, that is, the twelve categories. A unified consciousness (not a self or the Cartesian “I”), which is a structural feature of experience necessary to provide the unity to our experience, what Kant calls, “the transcendental unity of apperception,” rule governed and connected by the categories, experiences real objects that we perceive and that exist independently of our perception of them. Thus, the spatiotemporal objects are necessarily relative to and subject to the a priori forms of experience, that is, forms of sensibility and the understanding. In this sense, Kant does away with the noumenal world of absolutes, which is unknowable as the independent objects are phenomenal, relative to the a priori forms of experience. Unlike Kant, however, Haitian idealism posits that the nanm, soul, constituted by its three structures, which provides unity to our experiences, is a material thing, a Cartesian I composed of three distinct entities, ti bon anj, gwo bon anj, and ko (sometimes four, lwa met tet, as in Haitian metaphysics a serviteur of vodou may have a fourth consciousness that directs it in its decision-​making) that are also tied to the natural and noumenal world and can be manipulated in life as well as death. Haitian/​Vilokam idealism as such indicates a condition of absolute on the one hand as it pertains to the Vilokanic or noumenal world; and relativity in our notions of objects and reality on the other as it pertains to the phenomenal world. In terms of the latter, the phenomenal world, in other words, is simply the world of plurality constituted by imperfect beings, anti-​dialectically (constantly fighting against the praxis of others for their own understanding), living through their aggregated material bodies and imperfections. Consequently, epistemologically speaking, the phenomenal world in Haiti resembles an epistemological anarchic world where everyone exists for their own liberty and existence according to their own developmental track, capacities, modalities, methods, and belief systems governed by an eye for an eye normative worldview, which prevents others from encroaching on an individual’s (regardless of their level of development) right to exist. Out of this libertarian phenomenal world of plurality enframed by the absolute Vilokanic/​noumenal, the concepts of liberty and equality (libertarianism and egalitarianism) would arise, drive the Haitian Revolution, and constitute Haitian identity and society in the mountains and provinces of the country via their form of system and social integration, that is, the lakou system and the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, respectively. Moreover, in keeping with Firmin’s logic of highlighting Black people’s contributions to the universality of science, the argument posited here is that it is the metaphysics, ontology, physics, sociology, and epistemology of this

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  209 The Noumenal world of Vodou Bondye Bon (God is good) Transcendental Ideals (Lwa yo): God created humanity as an energy source out of itself. Humanity developmentally embodies the transcendental ideals (synthetic a priori/categories—lwa yo) to experience the empirical world as an aspect of god. Transcendental Idealism

The External World, multiverse, and humanity

Empirical Realism (the phenomenal world) Human society: the attempt to reify the noumenal world in and as the phenomenal world. Humanity combines experience in and as the material world as embodied subjects/agents of the transcendental ideals to constitute society in the phenomenal world, which replicates the noumenal so that human agents can recursively reorganize and reproduce their best natures depending on their own developmental tracks.

Figure 10.1 Haitian epistemological transcendental idealism.

Haitian transcendental idealism and realism as revealed in contemporary quantum and social theorizing, and not any racial essentialism or reactionary logics of oppression, that forms the basis for African people’s contributions to the social sciences and social theory. Paul C. Mocombe’s phenomenological structural theory and methodology, which attempts to resolve the structure/​agency problematic of the social sciences, better captures this universal process over Afrocentricity, noirisme, Black modernity, “double consciousness,” and so on.

Conclusions: Phenomenological Structuralism In keeping with the universal project of Firmin and highlighting African people’s contribution to the social sciences, at the base of Mocombe’s

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210  Paul C. Mocombe Table 10.1 Major lwa yo in Haitian vodou and their concepts Lwa (Loas) 1. Legba 2. Dambalah Wedo (Snake): The father of all Loas. The sun. 3. Azaka Mede 4. Kouzen Zaka (Brother of Azaka) (Peasant) 5. Ayida Wèdo (female counterpart of Dambalah): The moon. 6. Erzilie Dantò 7. Erzili Freda Dahome (rival of Dantor) 8. Ogou Feray 9. Ogou Badagri 10. Baron 11. Gede (Offspring of Baron Samdi and Grande Brigitte) 12. Kalfou (Gede Mercure, the bad side of Legba) 13. Simbi 14. Marassa (Twins)

Concept Key to the spiritual world—​Communication Animus—​Masculinity—​Paternal love and Medicine Agriculture—​Hard working Agriculture—​Peasant life Rainbow—​Anima—​Femininity Maternal love—​Mistrust—​ Androgyny—​lesbianism Love—​Polygamy—​Ideal dreams—​ Hope and aspiration Political Warrior Scholar lwa. Prophesy. Death Spirits of the ancestors—​The crossing from life to death. Bad and good principle Misfortune—​Destruction—​ Injustice Water and cure for supernatural illness Fertility—​Androgyny—​Jealousy—​ Capricious—​Powerful healers.

social scientific theory, phenomenological structuralism, is Haitian epistemology, Haitian/​Vilokan idealism, and not racial essentialism or reactionary theories of oppression. In experiencing the world, African people developed universal scientific concepts that the West would develop and omit. For Mocombe, the parallels and omissions in the original sciences of African people, and not race or theories of oppression, are keys to further developing the sciences and understanding African people’s contributions to that project. Unlike German idealism, whose intellectual development from Kant to Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School produced the dialectic, Marxist materialism, Nietzschean antidialectics, phenomenology, and deontological ethics. According to Mocombe (2017, 2018), Haitian epistemology, Haitian/​ Vilokan idealism, produces a hermeneutical phenomenology, materialism, and an antidialectical process to history enframed by a reciprocal justice as its normative ethics. The latter, antidialectic, is an approach to the historical process constantly being invoked by individual social actors to reconcile the parallel worlds of creation assumed in Haitian ontology and epistemology: the noumenal (sacred—​ideational world of Vilokan) and phenomenal (profane—​material world) subjective world in order

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  211 to maintain balance and harmony between the two so that the human actor can live freely and happily with all of being without distinctions or masters. As such, Haitian epistemology as a form of transcendental realism and idealism, Haitian/​ Vilokan idealism, is phenomenological, in the Heideggerian sense (that is, hermeneutical), material in the Marxian sense, and antidialectical. It refutes Hegel’s claims for the importance of historical formations and other people (social formations) to the development of self-​consciousness. Instead, Haitian/​Vilokan idealism, phenomenologically, is an antihumanist philosophy that emphasizes the things in the consciousness (lwa, or concepts, ideas, ideals) of the individual as they stem from the noumenal/​Vilokanic world, and get interpreted according to their level of learning, development, capacity for knowledge, methods, and modality, that is, the way they know more profoundly—​ kinesthetically, visually, and so forth, as they antidialectically and relationally seek to reproduce them in the phenomenal world as their practical consciousness against other interpretive formations of these same concepts in the material world as recursively organized and reproduced by others. So, what does Haitian/​Vilokan idealism, its metaphysics, phenomenology, materialism, sociology, antidialectics, antihumanism, and reciprocal justice, have to say to modern science, both physical and social, in terms of the development of a theory and methodology? For Mocombe, it is the materialist holism of Haitian idealism, which attempts to connect cosmology, cosmogony, social relations, the phenomenology of subjective experience, and the process of antidialectics, which is important. For they offer a new conception of human agency, which is tied to physics, phenomenology, and human social relations, that is relevant for the social sciences and its ongoing debate to resolve its structure/​agency problematic. That is, Haitian/​Vilokan idealism is tied to a materialist holism that directs human social action, via its antidialectical historical process, toward the transcendentally real ideational concepts, lwa yo, of the natural and supernatural world above social constructive identifications, which, as subjective positions, attempt to limit human phenomenological agency as it experiences being-​ in-​ the-​ world. In this vision, it offers, through the concept and process of antidialectics, antihumanism, and phenomenology, an agential theory of social action that is relevant for the construction of a social theory and methodology for the social sciences that is scientifically universal, antiracially essential, and non-​reactionary to white supremacy. It is the materialism, physics, and metaphysics of Haitian/​ Vilokan idealism, its antihumanism, phenomenology, and antidialectical viewpoint of Haitian social practice, that Mocombe attempts to tie to quantum mechanics and the phenomenology of German idealism that it parallels in his structurationist theory and methodology, that is, phenomenological structuralism. Hence, what Mocombe is suggesting in phenomenological structuralism, which seeks to highlight the phenomenology of

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212  Paul C. Mocombe being-​in-​the-​structure-​of-​those-​who-​control-​a-​material-​resource-​frame work and the origins of our practical consciousness vis-​à-​vis our aggregation as subatomic/​chemical particles, is that embodiment is the objectification of the transcendental ego. This transcendental ego is a part of a universal élan vital, the superverses and multiverses, that has ontological status in dimensions existing at the subatomic particle level and gets embodied via, and as, the body and connectum of Being’s brains. Moreover, embodied hermeneutic individual consciousness is constituted via recycled/​ entangled/​ superimposed subatomic neuronal particle energies that are aggregated as a transcendental ego and the body in their encounter and interpretation of past/​ present/​ future recycled/​ replicated/​ entangled/​superimposed neuronal memories and things enframed in and by the language, bodies, ideology, ideological apparatuses, communicative discourse, and practices (social class language game) of those who control the economic conditions of an aggregated material resource framework and its social relations of production. In consciousness, as phenomenology posits, it (individual subjective consciousness of embodied beings) can either choose to accept the structural knowledge, differentiation, and practices of the (chemical, biological, and physiological) drives of the body; the impulses (phenomenal properties) of psychionic recycled/​replicated/​ entangled/​ superimposed past consciousnesses of subatomic neuronal particles; the actions of those who control, via their bodies, mode of production, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse; and the economic conditions of the material resource framework and recursively reorganize and reproduce them in their practices, or reject them, through the deferment of meaning in ego-​centered communicative discourse, for an indeterminate amount of action-​theoretic ways-​ of-​being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others, which they may assume at the threat to their ontological security. It is Being’s (mental) stance or analytic, ready-​to-​hand, unready-​to-​ hand, and present-​at-​hand vis-​à-​vis 1)  the ontogenetic (chemical, biological, physiological, and so on) chemical drives and forms of sensibilities and understanding of the aggregated body and brain, 2) impulses, phenomenal properties, of residual actions/​memories of embodied recycled/​ entangled/​superimposed past consciousnesses/​subatomic particles, 3) the phenomenological meditation/​deferment that occurs on the latter actions, and ideologies of a social system along, and 4)  with its dialectically determined differentiating logic, which produces the variability of actions and practices in, and as, cultures, social structures, or social systems that enframe the material world. In the end, however, 5)  power and power relations of those who internalize the structural reproduction and differentiation, stemming from the mode of production, of the social structure as their practical consciousness, as well as the antidialectical disposition of those who do not, determine what alternative actions are allowed to manifest in the world

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Reconstructing Social Sciences  213 So to the end of fixing structurationism to account for the nature and origins of alternative practical consciousnesses outside the structural reproduction and differentiation of capitalist relations of production in modernity, Mocombe’s (2016, 2018)  phenomenological structuralism builds on the material relationship highlighted in physics between the identity and indeterminate behavior of subatomic particles in quantum mechanics (the notions of superposition and quantum entanglement) and the determinate behavior of atomic particles in their aggregation as highlighted in general relativity to understand the material constitution of consciousness at the subatomic/​neuronal level in, and as, the brain. So borrowing from Haitian/​Vilokan idealism, this interconnectedness between the world of phenomenon and noumenon and the human being as a material subject whose nanm is a material thing capable of constructing their own phenomenological experiences. Mocombe’s project as such continues the universal construction of the social sciences, which Firmin began with anthropology, by neither reifying a Black psychology to account for the African contribution, à la noirisme and Afrocentricity, nor a reactionary theory of oppression as found in Duboisian “double consciousness,” for example. Instead, he builds on the Firminian “human” essentialist and universal conception that African people are no different from whites and possess the same intellectual capacities by emphasizing the scientific nature of their vodou science and tying it to the scientific project of the West to develop his theory of phenomenological structuralism.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis (2001). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New  York: Monthly Review Press. Beauvoir, Max (2006). Le grand recueil sacré : ou répertoire des chansons du vodou Haïtien. Presses Nationales d'Haiti : Bibliyotèk Nasyonal d'Ayiti. Blackburn, Robin (2008). The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the Americas: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. London; New York: Verso. Desmangles, Leslie G.  (1992). The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Dubois, Laurent (2012). Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New  York: Metropolitan Books. Firmin, Joseph-​ Antenor (2002). The Equality of the Human Races (Charles Asselin, Trans.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fleurant, Gerdes (2006). Dancing Spirits: Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite (Contributions to the Study of Music & Dance) New  York: Greenwood. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977 [1807]). Phenomenology of Spirit (A.V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]). Being and Time. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Mocombe, Paul C. (2019). Haitian Epistemology. London, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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214  Paul C. Mocombe Mocombe, Paul C. (2018a). Mind, Body, and Consciousness in Society: Thinking Vygotsky via Chomsky. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mocombe, Paul C. (2018b). “Haitian/​Vilokan Idealism versus German Idealism.” Cross Currents: An International Peer-​Reviewed Journal on Humanities & Social Sciences, 4, 4: 69–​74. Mocombe, Paul C. (2017a). Identity and Ideology in Haiti: The Children of Sans Souci, Dessalines/​Toussaint, and Pétion. New York: Routledge. Mocombe, Paul C. (2017b). “Phenomenological Structuralism: A Structurationist Theory of Human Action.” Sociology International Journal, 1(1): 0005. doi: 10.15406/​sij.2017.01.00005. Mocombe, Paul C. (2017c). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; and the Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism.” Sociology, 51, 1: 76–​90. Mocombe, Paul C. (2016). The Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism: The Practical Consciousness of the African People of Haiti. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Nicholls, David (1979). From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rigaud, Milo (1985). Secrets of Voodoo. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

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11  The Abolition of All Privilege Race, Equality, and Freedom in the Work of Anténor Firmin Greg Beckett

On July 17, 1884, Haitian lawyer and diplomat Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin was elected a member of the Paris Anthropology Society. Firmin was part of a long line of Haitian thinkers who critiqued European racism and colonialism. By the end of the nineteenth century, many Haitian intellectuals were turning to anthropology to make those critiques, and we might think of Firmin and others (such as Joseph Janvier, who was also a member of the Paris Anthropology Society) as the architects of what Gérarde Magloire-​Danton (2005:152) calls “one of the earliest native anthropologies.” A  year after his initial election to the Society, Firmin wrote a sustained critique of the doctrine of race in French anthropology and of the relation between racism and European colonization and domination. Appearing just as European powers were carving up African colonies at the Berlin Conference, Firmin’s critique denounced racism and called for the “universal alliance of peoples and races” (Firmin 2002:449). And yet, when he presented this work to the Society it was “quietly shelved” (Magloire-​Danton 2005:153, n11). Firmin was born in 1850 in Cap-​Haïtien, then the social and economic capital of the north of Haiti, to a Black family of modest means. As a child, his intellectual promise showed early and his family worked hard to send him to the best schools in the country. Education was key to social mobility in Haiti, and especially so for Black families looking to move upward in a country where color was a key idiom of social standing. But color in Haiti is a much more fluid category than race, since “social direction” or “the path that an individual is perceived to be taking up or down the social ladder” has always been at least as crucial to determining one’s identity as has color—​a fact with which Firmin was intimately familiar (Trouillot 1990:120–​21; see also Dubois 2012:180–​ 84; Price-​Mars 1964). His experience with color and race as socially fluid categories, coupled with the colonial and postcolonial history of Haiti, led Firmin to think of racial differences in social and historical, not biological, terms. Firmin first went to Paris as a representative of the Haitian government, an appointment that already signaled his social direction. His time in Paris would turn out to be instrumental to his continued ascent, for it

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216  Greg Beckett was there that he wrote The Equality of the Human Races, the book that would make him famous, at least in Haiti. As Firmin notes (2002:liv), he was drawn to the Anthropological Society not because of an intrinsic interest in the subject matter but rather because of the shock he felt when he came “across dogmatic assertions of the inequality of the races and the inferiority of Blacks” by members of the Society. Decades later Haitian historian and ethnologist Jean Price-​Mars (1964:148) noted the “cruel paradox” of the position in which Firmin found himself, participating in sessions during which the inherent inferiority of the Black race was repeatedly discussed and accepted as a scientific fact. Firmin was of course acutely aware of the difficulty of the situation, of which he wrote: Does it make sense to have seating as equals within the same Society with men whom the science which one is supposed to represent seems to declare unequal? At the opening of our meeting at the end of last year, I could have requested a debate about the issue within the Society in order to elucidate the scientific reasons why most of my fellow scientists divide the human species into superior and inferior races. But I  risked being perceived as an intruder and, being ill-​ disposed against me, my colleagues might have rejected my request without further thought. (2002:liv) Firmin was right to be skeptical of his colleagues. On a subsequent trip to Paris in 1892 he did intervene in a discussion of racial inequality, suggesting that Black Africans were currently unable to achieve the same level of development as white Europeans because of the prevailing social, political, and economic conditions under which they lived, not because of some innate inferiority. The president of the Society, Professor Bordier, interrupted Firmin to ask if he had any white ancestors. As Robert Bernasconi (2008:383) notes, the implication of the question was clear: he was being asked whether his intelligence could be explained only in this way […] and it showed how in an instant Firmin’s colleagues could switch from considering him a participant in their debates to treating him as an object of anthropological study. By the time of his failed intervention, Firmin had already written Equality and his position on the doctrine of racial inequality was a matter of record with the Society. But Bordier’s interjection showed just how little weight Firmin’s critique of inequality held among the leading anthropological minds of the time. In retrospect, it is easy to say that Equality should have been a landmark text in anthropology, but instead it was systematically silenced (cf. Trouillot 1995). When Firmin died in 1911, he was an internationally known political figure: he took part in negotiations with the

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The Abolition of All Privilege  217 United States over a portion of Haitian territory and he pushed for the formation of a Pan-​Caribbean federation (Dash 2004; Dubois 2012:184–​ 203; Price-​Mars 1964). And yet, while his obituary in the New  York Times described him as a “man of considerable education and culture,” it made no mention of Equality or even of his position on race and racism (New  York Times 1911). In recent decades, there has been renewed interest in Firmin’s work. Robert Bernasconi (2008) has noted Firmin’s connection to Comtean positivism (a position Firmin himself signaled by referring to his project as a “positive anthropology”). Carolyn Fluehr-​ Lobban (2000:449) calls Firmin a pioneer of anthropology and suggests he was “the first scholar of African descent to write a systematic work of anthropology.” Indeed, as Fluehr-​Lobban (2000) shows, Firmin’s work was decades ahead of its time, prefiguring both Pan-​Africanism and the Boasian rejection of racial essentialism (see also Magloire-​Danton 2005). I agree that Firmin ought to be read more widely and that he ought to be accorded a place in the history of the discipline, in part because in doing so we are reminded of how much the discipline has struggled with the problem of race. But there is more to glean from Firmin than just this. What Equality offers is not just an alternative view on race but also an immanent critique of the discipline itself, one that argues for the biological equality of all humans and shows how the doctrine of race and the idea of human inequality both arose out of a defense of European colonialism and racism. There is something worth aspiring to in Firmin’s insistence that anthropology as a discipline is best suited to a critical understanding of the questions of race, equality, and freedom. After all, given the conclusions of anthropologists at the time, it is hard to imagine why he thought the discipline worth defending, since it seemed hopelessly tied to the doctrine of racial inequality. My goal, then, is something more than recuperating a lost anthropological ancestor (although I think he ought to be part of our intellectual history). Rather, my aim is to recapture the spirit of his critique, so that we might, in turn, develop new and more radical critiques of our own.

Race and Inequality in Nineteenth-​Century French Thought The question of the origin and nature of inequality has long been at the heart of modern social theory. Rousseau sought to answer it by distinguishing between natural and moral inequality—​the former based on physical differences, the latter on historical and social ones. Of course, Rousseau’s view—​like all ideas of equality—​was based in good measure on his sense of actually existing forms of inequality. In this sense, it was both a description of the world (inequality exists) and a normative account of how the world ought to be (many forms of inequality need not exist). By the time of the French Revolution, these ideas were being tested in practice. It was not clear, though, how much equality could be equally distributed among all peoples, as the debates about slavery

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218  Greg Beckett among republicans, colonial planters, and defenders of the ancien régime clearly showed. While the Revolution initially ended slavery in the colonies, there was much dispute about the policy. This tension was clearest in discussions of the Haitian Revolution, which remained an “unthinkable” event even as it happened (Trouillot 1995). On the eve of the declaration of independence in Haiti, French philosophers and politicians reversed the abolition of slavery in the colonies, arguing, as Saint Simon did in 1803, that the extension of freedom to Blacks had been a categorical error since the physical makeup of Blacks meant they were “not susceptible, even with the same education, of rising to the intellectual level of Europeans” (Stocking 1982:38). Lying behind the political debate about the granting of rights and freedoms to slaves was a deeper issue, that of the capacity of slaves—​ and Africans more broadly—​to attain or exercise freedom and equality. Throughout the nineteenth century, the question of capacity was increasingly posed in the language of race. Nineteenth-​century race thinking revived Rousseau’s idea of natural inequality and made it the explanatory basis of moral or social inequality. As the concept of race took center place in anthropology in the nineteenth century, it did so in tight connection with the idea of inequality, which itself became a defense—​or naturalization—​ of colonialism, slavery, and other forms of domination. As race became a way of talking about objective facts, it did so alongside racism as a social practice rooted in what Glenn Loury calls the “withholding of the presumption of equal humanity” (Fields and Fields 2012:17). As Karen and Barbara Fields remind us, “race is the principal unit and core concept of racism.” But the discourse of race hides the social practice of racism, and in the nineteenth century the turn to natural history, Linnean taxonomy, and Lamarckian and Darwinian accounts of evolution all gave race a seemingly neutral scientific gloss. Race was so central a concept in the nineteenth century that even abolitionist thinkers tended to accept the general frame of reference that linked the physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics of human groups (Drescher 1992:364–​66). The question of race thus took shape in relation to the twin values of equality and hierarchy. French thought remained committed to equality as central to democratic life. And yet, democratic equality is a thin concept, aiming at universal significance without regard to concrete details. It is always confronted with the thick reality of particular forms of social inequality, and it is here that a “serious and unexpected consequence of egalitarianism” emerged: In a universe in which men are conceived no longer as hierarchically ranked in various social or cultural species, but as essentially equal and identical, the difference of nature and status between communities is sometimes reasserted in a disastrous way: it is then conceived as proceeding from somatic characteristics—​which is racism. (Dumont 1970:51)

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The Abolition of All Privilege  219 And the somaticization of inequality made it possible for equality and hierarchy to coexist without apparent contradiction. At the beginning of the century the first major line of scientific defense of racial hierarchy was comparative anatomy, of which Georges de Cuvier was the leading figure. Cuvier’s approach to race and anatomy differed markedly from that of the abolitionists. The latter tended to view their studies of racial difference in philanthropic terms, so that even when they argued Blacks were inferior or deficient when compared to whites, they did so as part of a humanitarianism inflected with a case of noblesse oblige. In contrast, Cuvier treated race as a scientific object of study and argued that a rational study of anatomical difference should be based only on facts and material artifacts, not on humanitarian values. Cuvier urged colonial and scientific travelers to gather bodies and skulls from around the world “in any manner whatever.” As George Stocking (1982:30–​31) has noted, “his attitude toward the savage was that of a grave-​ robber rather than a philanthropist” (see also Bender 1965; Conklin 2013; and Fogarty and Osborne 2003). Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was based on the idea that racial types were not only distinct but that racial groups varied in terms of their physical, moral, and intellectual composition, and thus his system for classifying races was also a system of ranking them. This position was typical of a general frame of reference that guided European science as it emerged from Enlightenment philosophy, a frame that linked race, progress, and reason. As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997:4) suggests, the Enlightenment’s declaration of itself as “the Age of Reason” was predicated upon precisely the assumption that reason could historically only come to maturity in modern Europe, while the inhabitants of areas outside Europe, who were considered to be of non-​European racial and cultural origins, were consistently described and theorized as rationally inferior and savage. As Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (2003:7–​28) puts it, the idea of European civilization required a savage slot against which it could construct itself. While Enlightenment philosophy provided the foundations for this position, in the nineteenth century the new science of race carried it further—​ and when it came to discussions of race, French anthropology was at the forefront. It is possible to grant French anthropology the symbolic birthdate of August 24, 1800, when Louis François Jauffret, the founder and secretary of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, led the group’s members in a toast “to the progress of anthropology” (Stocking 1982:16). The Observateurs was part of a flourishing network of scientific and learned societies that emerged at that start of the century, and it was the world’s first such society devoted to the new discipline of anthropology. Jauffret had ambitious plans for his organization, including the development of

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220  Greg Beckett methods of classification based on comparative anatomy and a catalogue of the customs and habits of peoples around the world. The Observateurs soon disappeared from the intellectual scene but it left an important legacy in French anthropology. They saw anthropology as a science that united the study of anatomy and custom—​what would later become physical anthropology and ethnology—​into a single study of the physical, moral, and intellectual aspects of humans. This approach was to remain at the center of anthropological discussions of race in France for over a century (Bender 1965; Blanckaert 1988, 2003; Conklin 2013; De L’Estoile 2003; Peabody and Stovall 2003). In retrospect, it is impossible to separate the scientific debates about race in France from the debates about slavery in the colonies, but at the time the correlation between theories of race and the practice of slavery was seldom raised. It was thus possible for the Parisian Société Ethnologique to hold a series of sessions on the differences between whites and Blacks in 1847 to which no African or black Caribbean participants were invited. Blacks were “represented” at the sessions only as objects, through the various African skulls in the Society’s collection. The one living black brought into the Society was a resident of Paris who posed as a model for local artists. He was brought in for visual observation. (Drescher 1992:383) The Society, founded in 1841, counted among its members Saint-​ Simonians, naturalists, historians, physical anthropologists, and even representatives of French colonial plantations (Blanckaert 1988). Its secretary, Gustave d’Eichthal, opened the 1847 sessions by presenting three interrelated claims, all of which shaped subsequent discussions of race. He asserted that the difference between whites and Blacks was fundamental to all other human differences; that the white race was superior; and that whites and Blacks were not only physically different but also different in terms of their mental capacity, social relations, and even their role in the economy (Drescher 1992:379–​80). The only person at the sessions who argued otherwise was Victor Schoelcher, then the leading abolitionist thinker in France and soon to become a member of the revolutionary provisional government that, in 1848, presided over emancipation in the colonies. Schoelcher presented detailed evidence that countered many of the claims made by other speakers at the session. But facts did not win the day. Some members of the Society suggested Schoelcher’s evidence could be explained by the so-​ called civilizing influence that white groups had on Blacks. Others simply asserted that slavery itself was proof of innate difference, showing clearly who was superior (the master) and who was inferior (the slave), an argument that reiterated Aristotle’s quite durable claim that some people are naturally born to be slaves (Drescher 1992:382–​85). In both cases, the

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The Abolition of All Privilege  221 reaction to Schoelcher’s position showed just how much the question of race in France was connected to colonialism and slavery (Peabody and Stovall 2003:4). Not all anthropological accounts of race were such a bold defense of slavery. But at its core, race thinking has always been a defense of European power and privilege. As the concept of race slowly displaced the older concept of civilization, with all of its attendant meanings of progress, development, and perfection (see Kuper 1999:23–​29), there was a new need to explain race more fully. The new “racial science” united the Enlightenment concern with progress with a system according to which peoples could be classified and ranked through physical features or other measurements (Conklin 2013:5). In the first half of the nineteenth century, monogenism, which anchored a belief in the single origin of humanity in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, was the dominant position. By the 1850s, however, polygenism, which asserted the separate origins of the different races, had replaced it. After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, polygenists adapted their beliefs to the new evolutionary theory without giving up on the idea of a hierarchy of races and innate moral and intellectual differences. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the most prominent French intellectual to develop this position was Paul Broca, who in 1859 founded the Paris Anthropology Society (Stocking 1982:39–​40; Fluehr-​Lobban 2000:453). Broca saw physical anthropology as the solution to the monogenist-​ polygenist debate, but it was not the major break in race thinking he imagined it to be. There remained deep continuities between his physical anthropology, imagined as a scientific study of human race, and the colonial medicine and colonial science of previous decades (Fogarty and Osborne 2003:225). For example, under Broca, the Society began to focus on two central questions: Did pure racial types, free from any mixture, exist in the world? Did sexual unions between races produce viable hybrid offspring? Both questions assumed more than they asked, implying the existence of pure racial types and the hierarchical distinction between them. For in the absence of the idea of hierarchy, how else are we to understand the problem of race mixing? Broca and others were forced to acknowledge the difficulty of providing empirical proof of pure types, leaving the question of miscegenation and “hybrids” as the main focus of race thinking (see Bender 1965; Blanckaert 2003; Broca 1864; Conklin 2013:22–​26; Stocking 1982). Of course, the underlying idea was the problem of degeneration of pure types, a problem that was solidly rooted in the concern over the end of slavery in the colonies (Bender 1965; Blanckaert 1988, 2003; Conklin 2013; Parkin and de Sales 2010). When Broca died in 1880, Paul Topinard took up the mantle of the most prominent French anthropologist. Topinard continued in his predecessor’s footsteps, using craniology, phrenology, and other methods to attempt to demonstrate innate differences between races. (The same methods were also being used by the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso,

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222  Greg Beckett who developed the field of criminal anthropology and who argued there were “born criminals.”) But as George Stocking notes (1982:57–​58), “the more precise and extensive the observation and the measurement of mankind, the more tenuous was the ‘reality’ of the races they served to define.” This tension between theory and data was a central contradiction in race thinking, since it showed just how much the so-​called facts of racial differences were value-​laden claims. As Fields and Fields (2012) have argued, for the American context, it is not that race begat racism but rather that racism gave rise to the ideology of race (cf. De L’Estoile 2003). In this sense, French anthropology was less an objective science and more a folk model of difference naturalized.

Equality as a Fact and Value I want to return now to Firmin’s election to the Paris Anthropology Society. Firmin notes in Equality that he was drawn to anthropology because of its claims about racial inequality and difference—​claims that he aimed to disprove. While he disagreed with the conclusions of anthropologists, he had a much more flattering opinion of the discipline itself, describing it as the field of knowledge that united just about all others, from philosophy and morality to the natural sciences and history (Firmin 2002:2–​13). By working through the leading anthropological arguments of the time, he sought to show not only that all humans were equal but also how natural or biological equality could ground a normative value of social, economic, and political equality. He referred to his project as a “positive anthropology,” influenced by the positive sociology of Auguste Comte, but it is more accurate to see Firmin’s argument as an immanent critique of anthropology, since it proceeded from its central categories and concepts in order to arrive at a fundamentally different position about race and equality. In so doing, he was posing the problem of racism in a new way. He was not content, for example, to argue that theories of racial inequality were factually wrong. Others, like Schoelcher, had made similar arguments to little effect. Rather, he wanted to show the necessary connection between the factual error of the doctrine of racial inequality and the social context that produced such an idea. In effect, he was arguing that inequality was a central organizing value of European culture and that this value had in turn generated an ideology of racial inequality. In making this argument, Firmin made three key moves. First, he argued for the natural equality of all humans as an already established scientific fact. Second, he offered a critique of the theories of racial inequality in which he showed how these beliefs served to uphold specific forms of social, political, and economic domination. Finally, he showed how the doctrine of racial inequality was the central contradiction blocking human emancipation and he suggested that overcoming racial hierarchy would amount to the abolition of all forms of privilege. Let me turn to a detailed explication of each of these moves.

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The Abolition of All Privilege  223 Natural Equality Firmin’s first premise was that humans are naturally equal, a premise at odds with the accepted conclusions of the leading anthropologists of the time. How, then, did he intend to show this using the same evidence that advocates for racial inequality used? His first move was to intervene into the long-​standing debate between monogenists and polygenists. By the time he was writing Equality, the polygenist school was dominant in France, although the debate was far from settled, and by reviewing the literature Firmin showed quite easily that there was ample disagreement not only about the origin of the species but also about how to apply such concepts as race or species to humans. When it came to human classification, there was no consensus on how to classify groups or even on the definition of the categories themselves (2002:27–​34). Firmin began his discussion of the literature by stating he had no strong allegiance to either monogenism or polygenism, and he thus rhetorically presented his review as a thinking through of the two available explanations. But by the end of his presentation it was clear he adopted a scientific (as opposed to biblical) monogenist position, which posited a common origin to humanity even as it recognized that the species emerged and evolved in various locales around the world (2002:35–​84). But why should we accept the idea of multiple origins of a single species? In a move that anticipated the great innovations of Boasian anthropology in the twentieth century, Firmin suggested we do so because all human groups belonged to “a community of beings capable of understanding one another and joining their individual destinies” (2002:83). Much of his conclusion was already contained in this first premise—​for if there were no biological differences between races, then there could be no natural basis for superiority or inferiority of specific groups (see Firmin 2002:15–​86). How, then, had anthropologists gotten things so wrong? Why did they link inequality to biological aspects of human groupings? This is partly because of the circular reasoning common to race thinking, in which empirically visible differences between groups are used to define different races and then those same racial classifications are in turn used to explain empirical differences (see Fields and Fields 2012). As Stephan Palmié has noted in the case of contemporary genomics, the folk models of racial classification and the established cultural norms of heritability have repeatedly been smuggled into so-​called scientific systems of classification and distinction. Referring to the US case in particular, Palmié notes (2007:209) that while the specific historical origins of such discourses in regimes of slavery and segregation may have become subject to public disavowal, their knowledge-​ producing modus operandi obviously still serves to conjoin new epistemic means with an old epistemic end: that of

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224  Greg Beckett arbitrating “racial” identity and difference by recourse to empirical data interpreted as diagnostic signs of the presence or absence of traits or qualities thought to constitute indicators of racial essences in the bodies of those judged in this fashion. This curious logic led nineteenth-​ century anthropologists (and now twenty-​ first-​ century biologists) to posit the existence of pure racial types despite the rather obvious fact that no such types were empirically observable. Firmin thus showed the discrepancy between the evidence used by anthropologists and the claims made by them about racial distinctions, and he noted how racial classifications served another purpose, namely the perpetuation of an ideology of difference and inequality that had emerged alongside slavery in the colonies. Polygenists had already admitted pure racial types were not to be found but they asserted underlying racial types exerted a difference in the outward appearance and characteristics of particular groups. To make that argument, they turned to the issue of hybridity and miscegenation, and to the example of the colonies. Many polygenists asserted that the offspring of mixed-​race unions were sterile, a position that was patently absurd, as Firmin noted. Broca held a slightly more nuanced position, but one that still very much fit within the overall position of the polygenists, as it assumed a hierarchy of types in which physical features were said to express underlying differences in intellectual and moral abilities. Broca’s (1864) solution to the question of hybridity was to argue that in general such mixtures produced fertile offspring, but that some mixtures were better than others (more “eugenesic”). These unions were able to reproduce among themselves, he argued, without replenishing stock from the original sources. Other unions, especially those involving Black partners, were less eugenesic, and he ended his discussion of hybridity by noting that, biologically speaking, the possibility of eugenesic hybrids did not necessarily prove all humans were of the same species (see Blanckaert 2003). For Firmin, this was evidence that polygenists had mistaken distinctions caused by historical circumstances for evidence of general types. It was only on the basis of such a categorical error that one could believe mulattoes were infertile or unable to reproduce without a replenishment of “pure” stock. Of course, the underlying logic of race thinking was steeped in the folk epistemology of the colonies and the slave plantations. For example, Firmin quotes Broca as saying “The union of a Negro and a White woman is very often sterile, whereas the union between a White man and a Negress is always fecund” (2002:66). This and similar ideas were staples of plantation societies, where unions across color lines were common and where ideas of kinship and heritability grounded claims about the invisible ontology of pure racial types. But as Firmin was at pains to note, these folk epistemologies had become scientific assertions for which there was no evidentiary basis. As he put it, “the fecundity

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The Abolition of All Privilege  225 of mulattoes is a fact so well known by everyone who has ever lived in countries with a métis population that one can only be surprised that a scientist of Broca’s caliber can question it” (2002:68). If hybrids were not infertile, were they still inferior? While Firmin countered that claim with examples of Haitian intellectuals, the deeper cut came from his insistence that in showing that races are biologically equal and are all members of the same species, he had already disproved the claim of natural inequality too. Since the differences between human populations were not rooted in distinct and stable racial types, these differences were neither natural nor immutable. If differences in intelligence or moral character existed between groups, it would need to be explained as the result of unequal social circumstances. Once again, Haiti served as an example, with Firmin suggesting that during the colonial period mulattoes in Saint Domingue (the French colony that became Haiti) had been caught between two worlds. This “painful position” of hybrid populations was a historical situation—​not an innate inferiority or an “inferiority complex.” It was the effect of the structural conditions of the colonial regime, conditions that had since changed in independent Haiti and that might change in other locations in the future (2002:72–​73). Having defeated the polygenist view by abolishing any potential biological ground for theories of racial inequality, Firmin proceeded to lay the groundwork for the rest of his argument. He notes, “At this point I  can attempt to draw a conclusion without being suspected of acting under any other motivation than science. Science has been my only guide, and I  have neither the need nor the desire to stray from it.” This was the positivist core of his argument, where he separated his own position, as value-​neutral, from that of his adversaries, as value-​laden (and hence irrational). Thus, for Firmin, attempts by anthropologists to develop a system of classification of races had failed on two counts: First, they lacked any “solid principles” for determining meaningful biological distinctions between races. Second, they conflated the general problem of knowledge about the human species with the specific issue of the meaning or value of that knowledge. But such classifications have proceeded from the “preconceived systems” of various authors and made “natural facts conform to certain theories” (2002:88). At this point, Firmin outlined two positions he would pursue in the remainder of the text. First, he set himself the task of critiquing theories of racial inequality as a form of knowledge grounded in values but not facts. Second, he argued that the natural equality of races provided the basis for the abolition of privilege and for a truly human emancipation. A Critique of Inequality It is unfortunate that Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–​1855) is still the best-​known work on race from the nineteenth century. Gobineau was a French diplomat who served briefly

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226  Greg Beckett as Alexis de Tocqueville’s secretary before holding several government positions in Europe and abroad. His four-​volume tome remains a testament to aristocratic privilege, European imperialism, and white supremacy. Tocqueville, that grand defender of democracy and equality, wrote to Gobineau on the publication of the first volume, telling him that his ideas were “probably wrong and certainly pernicious” (Arendt 1968:158). Nevertheless, Gobineau’s Essay soon became the foundational text of scientific racism and, later, eugenics. As Firmin notes, Gobineau’s text is hardly a worthy opponent for critique. It is riddled with bad data and weak arguments and it is clearly written from the point of view of someone mourning the loss of the ancien régime. As Firmin pithily notes, Even though Monsieur de Gobineau, a man of great learning but of little understanding and proven lack of logic, believes that “the idea of an innate, original, profound, and permanent inequality among the races is one of the oldest and most widespread opinions in the world,” no student of history would support such a notion. (2002:139) And yet, the text and the position of the author were illustrative of a more general point—​that the so-​called scientific racism of nineteenth-​century anthropology was not much different in form or content from such naked defenses of imperialism and privilege. For, if there was no biological justification for theories of racial inequality, from where did they come? Firmin’s answer to this question, echoed decades later by anticolonial critiques, was that “the anti-​philosophical and anti-​scientific doctrine of the inequality of the races rests on nothing more than the notion of man’s exploitation by man” (2002:140). It is here that Firmin transposed the question of race into the broader question of power and privilege. He had already shown that theories of racial inequality had no grounding in facts, but Firmin was acutely aware of the reality of actually existing inequality—​which he said was not based on innate or natural inferiority but rather on historically traceable forms of social domination. That domination, in turn, was irrational and could not be justified by appeals to racial difference or by a hierarchy of civilizations. The concept of natural hierarchy on which such views were based presupposed what needed to be explained, namely the fact and value of inequality. If inequality had no factual basis in the world, then why did the value of inequality persist in European thought? The answer was clear—​inequality was a central organizing value of European society that served to justify its domination of others (Firmin 2002:142–​44). This was a bold argument, especially considering the pride of place given to the idea of equality by European philosophers. Of course, as others have noted, race was always a stumbling block in Enlightenment thought (Eze 1997). But the myth of racial inequality persisted because it served an important ideological function (Arendt 1968:160). As Firmin

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The Abolition of All Privilege  227 notes, “whenever Europeans discuss the scientific question of the equality or inequality of the human races, they do so as advocates in a case in which they are directly involved” (2002:383). Decades later, Franz Boas (1938, 1940) would only hint at the relation between European power and racism, but by the end of Equality Firmin felt ready to defend the claim that the European view of racial inequality was a fundamental blockage to the intellectual and moral development of humanity as a whole. Human history had a telos and over the long arc of time “men develop a feeling of solidarity which becomes increasingly stronger” (2002:379). Yet, in the case of white European nations, this solidarity had taken a pathological form, in that Europeans mistook their own economic development for natural superiority and on that basis had asserted “the right of Europe to impose its laws on other parts of the world” (2002:382). European thinkers had used race to grant domination the status of a moral value and scientific fact. This stance was hypocritical and irrational, but it also held the key to a true advancement for the human species, for the doctrine of inequality had also given birth to a possible recognition of a real and enduring equality. It is as if Firmin imagined that out of the ashes of slavery, colonialism, and racism would emerge a more perfect, just, and free world. But why should the doctrine of racial inequality hold the key to a universally valid concept of human equality (2002:382–​83)? After all, he explicitly says European racism was little more than a cover for the “greed and […] reprehensible materialism” of European colonialism. Caught up in “the colonizing lust” but out of step with the “moral temper of the century,” European powers had to find a way to justify their violation of natural rights and the rights of nations. Just as racism gave way to race thinking (Fields and Fields 2012), so too did imperialism give way to the idea of natural inequality, leaving “no choice but to resort to casuistry and the arbitrary interpretation of the facts to justify their actions” (2002:382–​83). Equality and Freedom Firmin’s final argument in Equality pushes his critique of inequality ever further. In the final chapters, he argues that the idea of racial inequality is naturalization of historically specific social conditions. Systems of racial classification had been projected into the past and mistaken as statements about human beings in general, rather than as ideas based on (and used to justify) political and social domination in the present. Firmin’s final move was to use his arguments about natural equality and his critique of the doctrine of inequality to ground a claim about human emancipation. Caribbean scholars have long argued that “the colonial relation […] had discursive effects, knowledge effects, on Europe” and that “the celebrated idea of freedom in the Enlightenment can be understood to have a connection, however mediated, to the institution of slavery in the

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228  Greg Beckett New World (Scott 2010:155; see also Patterson 1982; Sala-​Molins 2006; Trouillot 2003). Firmin wrote his critique of race thinking on the eve of the final abolition of slavery in the Atlantic world—​a process that began with the Haitian Revolution but took a century to complete. Why did the expansion of formal freedom to millions of people coincide with the development of a scientific defense of inequality, hierarchy, imperialism, and exploitation? The relationship between the expansion of individual freedoms and the legal and political recognition of equality on the one hand and the doctrine of racial inequality on the other is only paradoxical if we see these two positions as incompatible. But the whole history of the Enlightenment shows that proclamations of equality have always gone hand in hand with either an explicit defense of some forms of inequality (and the expulsion of some groups from the category of citizen or even humanity) or the structural silencing of the role played by slavery and unfreedom in the making of the modern world (Sala-​Molins 2006; Trouillot 1995). Nineteenth-​ century French anthropology played a key role in the defense of inequality when it became the leading science dealing with racial classification. Consider, for example, Topinard’s claim that “it is easy to foretell a time when those races who shorten the distance between the White man and the anthropoid will have completely disappeared.” Here we have the head of the Paris Anthropology Society proclaiming whitening as the working out of a natural law (Firmin 2002:439–​40). In response to Topinard, Firmin summed up his own position as follows: the conclusions reached by anthropologists are therefore as false as those articulated by the scholars and philosophers who have adopted or supported the doctrine of the inequality of races. It becomes obvious, then, that the very presence of this doctrine contaminates any branch of human knowledge with contradiction and illogic. (2002:441) Firmin’s critique ends by arguing that anthropological theories of race were nothing more than irrational justifications of racism and imperialism. Anthropology has always had a dubious relationship with race (Baker 1998). Few other disciplines can claim to have done more to counter the dominant ideologies of race thinking that the social sciences inherited from the Enlightenment. Certainly no other discipline has better shown the diversity of human experience around the world. And yet, the discipline’s inability to confront the myth of race at the moment of its very founding has left a troubling legacy. Even Boas, who fought for decades inside the academy and outside of it to shift American thinking on race, was unable to fully confront the issue. As Trouillot (2003:108) has noted, Boas succeeded in disconnecting race and culture but he was unable to connect race and racism—​that is, to show how and why racial ideologies continued to matter to systems of power in the United States and

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The Abolition of All Privilege  229 elsewhere (see also Baker 1998; Montagu 1974). When it came to tackling racism itself, Boas was almost silent, describing Gobineau’s Essay as an “ambitious attempt […] to explain national characteristics as due to racial descent” (Trouillot 2003:108). This was partly because Boas’s shift from race to culture did not include, or require, a critique of power. Yet, this is precisely what Firmin attempted, and in the final analysis he argues that the doctrine of racial inequality is the central problem to be overcome in order to realize full human emancipation. In a triumphant tone, he proclaimed that the “recognition of the equality of the races entails a definitive recognition of the equality of all social classes in every nation of the world” and that the moral principle underlying such a recognition thus acquires a universal import which reinforces and consolidates its authority. Wherever the struggle for democracy is being waged, wherever social inequality is still a cause of conflict, the doctrine of the equality of the races will be a salutary remedy. This will be [the] last blow struck against medieval ideas, the last step toward the abolition of privileges. (2002:438, emphasis mine) By contrast, proponents of racial inequality are always defenders of the privileges of birth and wealth. Gobineau, for example, turned to racism to defend a system of aristocratic privilege that had been undone first by the French Revolution and then by the abolition of slavery. Holding firmly to his own sense of birthright, Gobineau saw the loss of his privilege as the collapse of civilization itself (Firmin 2002:439). Likewise, Europe, faced with the end of slavery and the rise of liberal democratic values, also turned to racism to defend its planetary imperialism (Arendt 1968:160). We see in nineteenth-​century race thinking, then, the very core of the contradiction between equality and inequality, between freedom and slavery, and between hierarchy and egalitarianism. For Firmin, the only way forward, the only way through this contradiction, was to embrace equality as a natural fact, to reject inequality as an irrational value, and to strive for the full abolition of all privilege.

The Abolition of All Privilege Firmin’s critique is impressive, and it should be reclaimed as a valued piece of the history of the discipline. But it is also important to recognize that Firmin remained committed to many ideas we would now reject. He was, for example, a firm believer in the Enlightenment idea of progress. Like other philosophers of his time he saw human history as a moral success story, a working out of the perfectibility of the human species. He saw the Black race as playing a key part in that historical arc, since it had known most directly the effects of unfreedom, slavery, racism, and exploitation. But in knowing and feeling the full weight of dehumanization, Blacks had

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230  Greg Beckett also developed a uniquely critical and emancipatory view since, as Firmin put it, “the more one has suffered, the more one is prepared to understand and exercise justice” (2002:446). By contrast, Europeans had only paid lip service to equality and in European society “the notion of universal brotherhood has remained a mere joke.” After all, “one cannot conceive of brotherhood without equality” (2002:448). In making this claim, Firmin signaled his allegiance to an emerging liberal cosmopolitanism. How, then, might we read Firmin today? My suggestion is that we read him not as a critic of race, but as a critic of racism. That, after all, is the promise and the challenge of his work. To embrace Firmin today, to invite him into our own intellectual genealogy after a century of exclusion, is to also push ourselves beyond the now comfortable sense that race is a social construction or a fiction (or just bad science) and into a more direct encounter with racism as a deeply embedded set of beliefs and practices. Firmin’s work is, in fact, an important rejoinder to the Boasian intervention, which as Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (2003:105–​13) has suggested, replaced race with culture in part by distancing American anthropology from a direct political confrontation with racism. And yet, there are important limits to Firmin’s critique, for he remained tied to the idea of race itself (even as he argued for the equality between distinct races). It was anti-​racism but not anti-​race, for the standpoint of his critique was the very same idea of civilization that anchored French social thought. It is tempting to wonder what Firmin could have done if he had the concept of culture (rather than civilization) that was available to Boas. Would he have moved beyond race into a more radical critique? Magloire-​Danton (2005:160–​61) suggests Firmin’s work contains hints of a “Boasian humanism based on the principle of the intrinsic value and the plurality of cultural practices.” But perhaps this goes too far. I suggest instead we recognize the limits of Firmin’s own thinking, especially his commitment to a “liberal space of Enlightenment” (Trouillot 2003:114). When Firmin turned to the case of Haiti at the end of Equality, he described his native country as a “field of sociological observation” in which we could see direct evidence of the regeneration of the Black race. But in order for that regeneration to succeed, Haiti had to adopt the values of European civilization and “completely weed out of its political culture those customs which are but an unfortunate legacy from the past” (2002:313). And when he noted the historical shift that had made equality a real possibility in the world, he dated it to the French—​not the Haitian—​Revolution (2002:447–​48). Despite these limitations there remains something important in Firmin’s work. Indeed, his critique at times exceeds the bounds of his own framework, especially in the way he theorizes the historicity and persistence of the concept of race in relation to European colonialism and domination. If Boas gave us the language of culture to move beyond race, then Firmin gives us a language of power with which to confront

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The Abolition of All Privilege  231 racism, especially the racism embedded in our own concepts and categories. Perhaps, then, we would do well to return to Firmin, not only for his conclusions (which remain relevant and prescient) but also for his radical hope that anthropology has a key role to play in the critique of power and privilege. We might not agree with his teleological sense of progress or his commitment to the idea of race, but we have something to learn from his insistence that some values—​like inequality and racial hierarchy—​are not just relative to a society but are actually wrong, that other values are better, and that anthropologists can and should take a stance on such matters. In so doing, anthropology might also contribute to the abolition of privilege.

Bibliography Arendt H (1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt. Baker LD (1998) From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–​1954. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bender D (1965) The development of French Anthropology. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1(2):139–​51. Bernasconi R (2008) A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a philosopher against racism. Patterns of Prejudice 42(4–​5): 365–​83. Blanckaert C (1988) On the origins of French Ethnology: William Edwards and the doctrine of race. In: George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed) Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology. History of Anthropology Vol. 5. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 18–​55. Blanckaert C (2003) Of monstrous Métis? Hybridity, fear of miscegenation, and patriotism from Buffon to Paul Broca. In: Peabody S and Stovall T (eds) The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 42–​70. Boas F (1938) The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: The Free Press. Boas F (1940) Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan. Broca P (1864) On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo. Ebook available at: www.gutenberg.org/​ebooks/​47137 (accessed July 9, 2015). Conklin A (2013) In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–​1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dash MJ (2004) Nineteenth-​century Haiti and the archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s letters from St. Thomas. Research in African Literatures 35(2):44–​53. De L’Estoile B (2003) From the Colonial Exhibition to the Museum of Man: An alternative genealogy of French Anthropology. Social Anthropology 11(3):341–​61. Drescher S (1992) The ending of the slave trade and the evolution of European scientific racism. In: Inikori JE and Engerman SL (eds) The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 361–​96. Dubois L (2012) Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Picador. Dumont L (1970) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. London: Paladin. Eze EC, ed (1997) Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell.

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232  Greg Beckett Fields KE and Fields BJ (2012) Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America. London: Verso. Firmin A (2002) The Equality of Human Races. Charles A (trans). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fluehr-​ Lobban C (2000) Anténor Firmin: Haitian pioneer of anthropology. American Anthropologist 2(3): 449–​66. Fogarty R and Osborne MA (2003) Constructions and functions of race in French military medicine, 1830–​1920. In: Peabody S and Stovall T (eds) The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 206–​36. Kuper A (1999) Culture: The Anthropologist’s Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Magloire-​Danton G (2005) Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-​Mars: revolution, memory, humanism. Small Axe 9(2):150–​70. Montagu A (1974) Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. London: Oxford University Press. New York Times (1911) Gen. Anténor Firmin dead. New York Times. September 19, 1911. Nicholls D (1979) From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmié S (2007) Genomics, divination, “racecraft.” American Ethnologist 34(2):205–​22. Parkin R and de Sales A, eds (2010) Out of the Study and into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. Patterson O (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peabody S and Stovall T (2003: Introduction: Race, France, histories. In: Peabody S and Stovall T (eds) The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–​7. Price-​Mars J (1964) Joseph Anténor Firmin. Port-​au-​Prince: Imprimerie Séminaire Adventiste. Sala-​Molins L (2006) Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment. Conteh-​Morgan (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Scott D (2010) Antinomies of slavery, enlightenment, and universal history. Small Axe 33:152–​62. Stocking GW Jr (1982) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trouillot MR (1990) Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Trouillot MR (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Trouillot MR (2003) Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave.

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Contributors

Matthew Carson Allen is a doctoral student in French Studies at the University of Warwick. His work focuses on intellectuals from places deemed to be peripheral who have engaged critically with hegemonic constructs of race, language, and nationality. Allen has written a study of the Russian linguist Nikolai Marr for a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, which he coedited. Greg Beckett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University, in Canada. He has written extensively on Haitian politics, society, and history, with a focus on the lived experience of crisis and disaster. He is the author of There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-​au-​Prince. Patrick Delices is a Haitian scholar and public intellectual. Some of his publications include “The Digital Economy” in the Journal of International Affairs; “Cementing Scholarship with Service: Dr.  Ben at the Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon Where the God Hapi Dwells” in the Journal of Pan-​African Studies; “The African Origin of Haitian Vodou: From the Nile Valley to the Haitian Valleys” in the text Vodou in the Haitian Experience; “Oath to the Ancestors: The Haitian Flag Is Rooted in Vodou” in the text Vodou in Haitian Memory; and “To Decolonize the World: Thomas Sankara and the ‘Last Colony’ in Africa” in the text A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics, and Legacies of Thomas Sankara. Nathan H.  Dize is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. He is the content curator, translator, and coeditor of the digital history project A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-​ Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. With Siobhan Meï, he coedits the “Haiti in Translation” interview series for H-​Haiti. He has translated poetry and fiction by numerous Haitian authors, including Kettly Mars, Charles Moravia, James Noël, Néhémy Pierre-​Dahomey, and Évelyne Trouillot. His translation of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals was published in November 2020 with SUNY Press.

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234 Contributors Georges Eddy Lucien is Professor of History and Geography at l’Université d’État d’Haiti and Director of Laboratoire dynamique des mondes américains (LADMA, École Normale Supérieure). He is also responsible for the Master program in Geography and École Normale Superieur/​Paris (since 2014). He is a member of the Coordination team of the Département d’Histoire at ISERSS and the Universite d’État d’Haiti. He is author of several books on territorial recompositions and urban policies, including Espaces périphériques et économie d’archipel, la trajectoire contemporaine de la commune de Verrettes; Une modernisation manquée, Port-​au-​Prince 1915–​1956, volume 1: Modernisation et centralisation, for which he received a distinction from the Haitian Studies Association (HSA) in 2013; and Une modernisation manquée, Port-​au-​Prince 1915–​1956, volume 2: Centralisation et dysfonctionnements (Éditions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti, 2014). Tammie Jenkins holds a doctorate degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Her research interest is exploring the role that popular culture plays in the perpetuation of socially constructed gender roles and expectations through mass media outlets such as television, film, and literature. Dr.  Jenkins’s recent publications include “Moving beyond the Veil of Double Consciousness: Making the Past, Present in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” (Peter Lang) and “Visualizing Cultural Spaces: (Re) Imagining Southern Gothicism in the Film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (Koenigshausen & Neumann). She currently works as a special education teacher in her local public-​school system. Celucien L. Joseph is an intellectual historian, literary scholar, and theologian. He is an associate professor of English at Indian River State College. He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and a PhD in Theology and Ethics from the University of Pretoria (Pretoria, South Africa). He is the author of numerous academic books and peer-​reviewed articles. His recent books include Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion: Christianity, Vodou, and Secularism (2020), a 2020 “Important Political Book—​PoliticoTech Awards Finalist”; and Theologizing in Black: On Africana Theological Ethics and Anthropology (2020). His books From Toussaint to Price-​ Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought (2013), and Haitian Modernity and Liberative Interruptions: Discourse on Race, Religion, and Freedom (2013) received Honorable Mention at The Pan African International 2014 Book Awards. Siobhan Meï is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Fellow in Women and Gender Studies. Siobhan’s current research project focuses on the intersections of fashion, translation, and fiction in the Black Atlantic. Siobhan’s translations and scholarly

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Contributors  235 publications have appeared in The Fashion Studies Journal, The Routledge Handbook on Translation, Feminism, and Gender, Mutatis Mutandis, Transference, Callaloo, Sx Salon, and Caribbean Quarterly, among other places. Siobhan is a lecturer in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches courses on ethics, society, and technology. Glodel Mezilas (PhD, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México) specializes in Philosophy and History of Ideas and Ideology. He is the author of many books, such as La Caraïbe et la défaite de l’Histoire (Educa Vision, 2017); Haïti, les questions qui préoccupent (L’Harmattan, 2016); Africa en el discurso del Caribe (Solenodonte, 2016); Que signifie philosopher en Haïti? Un nouveau concept du Vodou (L’Harmattan, 2015); El trauma colonial, entre la memoria y el discurso. Pensar (desde) el Caribe (Educa Vision, 2015); Qu’est-​ce qu’une crise. Eléments d’une théorie critique (L’Harmattan, 2014). Paul B. Miller is Associate Professor of French and Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His PhD is in Comparative Literature and he is committed to comparative approaches to the literatures, languages, music, and cultures of the Francophone, Hispanic, and Anglophone Caribbean. His book, Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, was published in May 2010 by the University of Virginia Press. Paul C.  Mocombe is a Haitian philosopher and sociologist. He is also a former visiting professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Bethune Cookman University, assistant professor of Philosophy and Sociology at West Virginia State University, and president/​ CEO of The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc. He is interested in the application of his theory of phenomenological structuralism to contemporary issues such as the constitution of consciousness, race, class, and capitalism (globalization). He is the author of many books, including The Theory of Phenomenological Structuralism; Haitian Epistemology; Identity and Ideology in Haiti; Jesus and the Streets; and Race and Class Distinctions within Black Communities. Gudrun Rath currently holds a professorship in cultural studies at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria. She previously taught at the University of Constance, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Vienna. She was a fellow of the graduate school “The figure of the Third” at the University of Constance and holds a PhD from the University of Vienna. She is the author of Zwischenzonen. Theorien und Fiktionen des Übersetzens (Interstices: Translation in theory and fiction; Turia + Kant, 2013). As a member of the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften (Journal for cultural studies), she edited a special issue on her latest research: Zombies (2014). Together with Isabel Exner, she edited the volume

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236 Contributors Lateinamerikanische Kulturtheorien (Latin American cultural theories; KUP, 2015). Her second monograph, on narratives of zombification from a historical and transatlantic perspective, will be published in 2021; an edited volume on forensics appeared in 2019. Gershom Williams is a cultural historian, teacher, lecturer, bibliophile, and community activist. For over thirty years he has conducted extensive study and research into the “pre-​and post-​” enslavement heritage of continental and diasporan Africans. His special areas of interest and concentration have been in the African origins of humanity, the African presence and influence on Nile Valley/​Egyptian and Western civilizations, and the foundational impact of ancient African people on Judeo-​Christian and Islamic religions. He is currently a professor of African American and United States history at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona. He has taught for the Maricopa Community College District for 20  years; he is a founding member of the East Valley Kwanzaa Committee; and he is a cofounder of The Bennu Institute of Arizona. He attended Indiana University where he majored in African American Studies and Sociology, and he has an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Amen-​Ra Theological Seminary. He served as guest editor of the seminal volume of scholarly essays celebrating the intellectual life and work of Haitian scholar and statesman Joseph Antenor Firmin (1850–​1911), for The Journal of Pan African Studies (JPAS) (2014).

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Index

Note: Figures are indicated by italics and tables by bold type. Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the endnote number e.g., 57n50 refers to endnote 50 on page 57. abolition, of slavery 12, 15, 30, 148, 153, 218, 228, 229 activism 139, 141, 143, 149, 164; of Anténor Firmin 5, 88, 97, 123, 124, 130, 133 actors, human 81, 83, 187, 208, 210–​211 African diaspora 87, 98, 114, 144, 197 African independence 138, 148 African inferiority 137, 179 African languages 65, 165, 188 African maroons 78, 148 African Origin of Civilization, The: Myth or Reality 161, 163–​164, 166 Africanisms 128, 197 Afrocentrism 6, 7, 87, 137, 196, 197, 198; and Egyptology 147, 150, 166 Age of Reason see Enlightenment agency 198, 209, 211; political 103, 140 agency/​structure problematic 198, 209, 211 Alexis, President Nord 90, 114, 115, 148 analytical categories, renewal of certain 79 anatomy 48, 53–​54, 140, 196, 219, 220; comparative 50, 99, 219, 220 Ancien Régime 67, 218, 226 ancient Egypt 32, 136, 137, 144, 149, 152, 153, 154, 164, 165 anthropology: biological 53; and Haitian context in nineteenth century 13–​16; physical 48, 53, 220, 221; positive 49, 217, 222

anti-​Black racism 20, 87, 112 anti-​Bonapartism 34 anti-​clericalism 179 anti-​colonialism 5, 15, 66 anti-​imperialism 2, 5, 34, 131 antillanité, in Édouard Glissant 20–​23 anti-​positivist anthropology 181 anti-​racism 2, 54–​55n3, 87, 133, 142–​143, 151, 195, 230; and modernity 11, 15, 18 anti-​slavery 15, 51, 57n501 Arendt, Hannah 12, 226, 229 Article 14, of Haiti’s 1805 constitution 14 Aryanism 47, 65 Asante, Dr. Molefi Kete 7, 154, 155, 156, 162, 166–​167 Atai, skull of 53–​54 Authentists 155, 156, 157 authority 12, 23, 68, 93, 100, 229 autonomy 2, 13, 30, 34, 89, 106, 128, 181 avoidance 71, 82 Ayiti 14, 77, 78 Balaguer, Joaquin 25 Bazelais, Jean-​Pierre Boyer 90, 101–​102, 103 Bellegarde, Dantes 90–​91, 103 Berlin Conference (1885) 123, 157–​158, 215 Betances y Alacán, Ramon Emeterio 15, 39, 47, 52, 113 biological anthropology 53 Black African languages 65, 165, 188 1 anti-esclavagiste

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238 Index Black Atlantic 52, 124 196; Pan-​ Africanism in 130–​132 Black dignity 95, 96 Black freedom 98 “Black Genesis”, of human origin 1–​2 Black inferiority 6, 12, 32, 48, 109, 125, 126, 135, 153, 159, 178, 195, 216 Black internationalism 5, 123–​133, 135–​145, 147–​169 Black liberation 17, 140, 156 Black modernity 196, 209 Black Nationalism 132, 135, 137, 139 Black scholars at center of world history 153–​166 Blackness 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 34, 38, 40, 138 Blyden, Edward Wilmot 16, 132, 135, 136, 154 Boas, Franz 49, 217, 223, 227, 228–​229, 230 Bolívar, Simon 15, 27n11, 110 Bonaparte, Napoleon 30, 150, 158 Bon-​dye 198–​199, 200–​201, 203, 205, 206–​207 Bordier, Professor Arthur 42–​43, 216 bourgeoisie 67, 101 brachycéphale 37 Broca, Paul 31, 32, 173, 177–​178, 179, 180, 221, 224; and nineteenth century legacy 48, 49, 50, 53–​54 brotherhood: Mouride 147, 148; universal 88, 111, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 230 Bulletins, of Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 32 Buteau, Pierre 104 capacity, of Black people 15, 38, 83, 132, 183, 195, 218 Cap-​Haïtien, Haiti 47, 147, 215; and Firminism 92, 98, 101, 107, 111, 113, 114 capitalism 23, 67, 73, 82, 83, 213 Caribbean Confederation Project 113, 141 Caribbean diaspora 128 Caribbean discourse, race and modernity in 3–​4, 11–​27 Caribbean intellectual tradition 3, 86 Caribbeanism 86, 147 Carruthers Jr., Dr. Jacob 153–​154, 157, 162 cephalic index 42, 43 Césaire, Aimé 129

chattel slavery see slavery Christianity 11, 19, 66 Clarke, Dr. John Henrik 128, 133, 157, 162, 163, 166 class 38, 97–​98, 101, 106, 114, 212; and sense of place 66, 67, 74, 75, 81 Code Noir 11, 66 collective African consciousness 149 Colombus, Christopher 68, 76–​77, 81 colonial epistemology 2 colonial pact principle 63 colonial space 67, 71, 74, 82 colonialism 5, 34, 124, 148, 153, 183; and Black Atlantic 195, 196–​197, 198; and Pan-​Africanism 135, 138, 139, 143; and privilege 215, 217, 218, 221, 227, 230; and race 11, 12, 14, 23; and sense of place 78, 79, 82 colonization 6, 7, 23, 135, 137, 138, 185; and privilege 215, 218, 220, 221, 224; and race 12, 14, 21, 22, 23, 123, 127, 133; see also sense of place colonized place 66, 67, 70–​71, 72, 78, 79, 83 colonized space 65, 66, 67, 71, 74–​75, 80, 81–​82 color prejudice 40, 108 color question, in Haitian politics 101, 107–​113 communal identity 14 communication 68, 200, 203, 210 comparative anatomy 50, 99, 219, 220 comparative linguistics, in Egyptology 165, 188 compared craniometry 49 Comte, Auguste 1, 6, 50, 222; and multilineal evolution 173, 174–​175, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 184, 189–​190; positivism of 6, 173, 174, 183–​184, 185, 217 conflict 71 73, 81, 82, 128, 183, 229 Connecticut, colonization of 70, 71 consciousness: collective African 149; double 196, 198, 209, 213; embodied hermeneutic individual 12; fourth 208; human 174, 211, 212, 213; national 18, 19, 21–​22, 90, 102; practical 201, 206, 207, 211, 212; unified 208 constitution, of Caribbean identity 24

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Index   239 Constitution et Luttes de Pouvoir en Haiti 104–​105 Constitutions: of Haiti 14, 30, 65–​66; and Firminism 91, 92, 96, 99, 110–​112, 113; in New World 71, 77–​78 corruption 89–​90, 98, 104, 105, 113 cosmic forces, in vodou 199, 200, 201, 203 Cours de philosophie positive 174 cranial shape 32, 37, 42, 43, 48, 49, 178 créolisation 11, 20–​23, 24 créolité 23–​25 creolized place 64 critical race theory 2, 87 Cuba 19, 62, 63, 76, 78, 113, 128 Cubanness 18–​19 cultural difference 50 cultural mixing 24, 182 Cuvier, Georges de 219 Damballah 199–​200 Dash, Michael 50, 52, 217 Daut, Marlene 4, 155 De l’égalité des races humaines 1, 2, 4, 6, 15, 158, 160, 195; and multilineal evolution 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 185, 187, 190; and nineteenth century legacy 46, 47–​48, 49, 51, 52–​53, 54; and racial equality 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 40–​41, 42, 43–​44n1 De l’inegalité des races humaines 4 decapitalization 67, 75 Dehoux, Jean-​Baptiste 31, 44n2, 55n18 dehumanization 11, 14, 229–​230 Delorme, Demesvar 98–​99, 108–​109, 109–​110 democracy 88, 89, 97, 98, 104, 107, 114, 226, 229 democratic socialism 5, 86, 88, 89 dependent space 66, 75 Desmangles, Leslie G. 202, 203, 205 Desormeaux, Daniel 34, 43–​44n1 despotism 90, 93, 94, 98, 101, 104, 107, 160 Dessalines, Jean-​Jacques 38, 78, 81, 92–​93, 93–​96, 129, 207 determinism 6, 14, 68, 80, 143, 175, 180, 182 détracteurs de la race noire et de a République d’Haïti, Les 15, 52, 160

diaspora: African 87, 98, 114, 144, 197; Caribbean 128 difference 6, 7, 83, 173, 181, 184, 222; anatomical 219; cultural 50; racial see racial difference Diop, Cheikh Anta 6, 133, 154, 155, 157; on Egyptology 147–​150, 167; popularity of work of (in comparison to that of Firmin) 157–​166 discrimination 20, 46, 54–​55n3, 74, 128 dispossession 75, 79–​80, 82–​83 doctrine unitaire 179 dolichocéphale 37 dominant place 77 domination 11–​12, 19, 102, 218; economic 222; European 12, 13, 14, 68, 215, 226, 227, 230; racial 14; and sense of place 66, 68, 70, 71, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83; social 226, 227; Western 12, 14, 26 double consciousness 196, 198, 209, 213 Du Bois, W.E.B. 6, 17, 114, 131, 132; and Egyptology 153, 154–​155, 157, 165, 167; and Pan-​Africanism 135, 136, 137, 138, 141 Dubois, Laurent 101, 196, 197, 215, 217 economic domination 222 economic independence 106, 138 economic liberalism 102 education, Haitian 89, 103, 112, 215 égalité 4, 30; see also equality Egyptology 2, 32, 136, 137, 144, 147–​169 1804 Revolution see Haitian Revolution emancipation 18, 78, 220, 222, 225, 227, 229, 230; potential of positivism for 6, 173, 174–​181, 183–​184 embodied hermeneutic individual consciousness 12 empirical realism 204, 209 empiricism 179, 204 English empire 62, 69 Enlightenment 12, 15, 20, 50, 103, 126, 150, 174, 181; and Black Atlantic 196, 197, 198; and privilege 219, 221, 226, 227–​228, 229, 230; and racial equality 33, 34, 37

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240 Index enslavement 12, 14, 50, 79, 82, 128, 133; see also slavery environmental determinism 68, 182 epistemology 26; Afrocentric 87; colonial 2; of Comte 174, 175; Eurocentric 159; of Firmin 86, 174, 175, 178; folk 224; Haitian 196, 198, 203–​209, 209, 210–​211; of Hegel 175; nineteenth-​century 33; positivist 178; and incorporation of idea of race in philosophy 26; regional 13; of science 7; Western 87, 185 equality: as fact and value 222–​225; natural 88, 222, 223–​225, 227; place 80; racial 33, 39, 54–​55n3, 96, 135, 179; see also égalité Equality of the Human Races, The see De l’égalité des races humaines essentialism 50, 154–​155, 184; human 197, 213; racial 196, 197, 198, 209, 210, 217 Ethiopianism 137, 138–​139 ethnicity 26, 32, 37, 42, 44n2, 66, 87, 137 ethnology 2, 48, 56n23, 175–​176, 195, 220; and race vindication 124, 125, 126 Eurocentrism 6, 34, 129, 137, 150, 156, 158, 159, 173, 181 Europe: domination by 12, 13, 14, 68, 215, 226, 227, 230; modernity of 6, 12, 26, 173; as opposite of the Caribbean 53; Scramble for Africa by 123, 133 evolution 2, 6, 173–​193, 192n59 examined place 63 exploitation 11, 14, 17, 23, 50, 226, 228, 229; and race vindication 123, 125–​126, 128; and sense of place 62, 66, 67, 74, 75, 78 extrasensory perceptions 204, 205–​206, 207, 208 Ezili 199, 200 Fanon, Frantz 12, 40, 157 Faustin I, Emperor 92, 93, 96–​97 Firmin, Joseph Auguste Anténor: as activist-​intellectual 5, 88, 97, 123, 124, 130, 133; on ancient Egyptian civilization 147–​169; birth of 92; and Black Atlantic 195–​213, 209, 210; as civil servant 97–​100, 107; Comte’s influence on

175–​176; contributions to the 1889 constitution 111; correspondence with Benito Sylvain 124, 125–​127; death in Saint Thomas of 115; on Dessalines 93–​96; development philosophy of 105–​106; on Edmond Paul 102–​103; education of 98, 99–​100; epistemology of 86, 174, 175, 178; exile in Saint Thomas of 106–​107, 115; founding of newspaper, Le Messager du Nord 107; inequality critique of 225–​227; involvement in 1902 insurgency 114; liberalism of 100–​107; loss of both his children 114; meeting with José Martí 113; as minister of public finances 105–​106; on multilineal evolution 173–​193; on natural equality 223–​225; obscurity of his work (in comparison to Diop) 157–​166; Pan-​Africanism of 123–​133, 135–​145; parents of 97; participation in inaugural Pan-​ African Conference 5, 57n63, 133; political career of 97–​100, 107, 110, 113–​115; on positivism 174–​187; on privilege 225, 229–​231; as public intellectual 1, 86, 87, 88, 89, 115; race vindication struggle of 123–​133; on racial dilemma in Haiti 108; respect for the law and constitution 110–​111; in Salnave’s revolt 98–​99; on sense of place 61–​85; Société d’Anthropologie de Paris membership 30–​32, 32–​33, 37–​38, 40–​41, 48–​49, 54, 157–​158, 174, 177, 178; on uniform change theory 187–​189 Firminian turn, in social sciences and humanities 2 Firminism 4–​5, 87, 88–​92 Fleurant, Gerdés 201–​202 Fluehr-​Lobban, Carolyn 31, 43–​44n1, 158, 217, 221 folk epistemology 224 fourth consciousness 208 freedom 5, 7, 12, 30, 82, 91, 94, 104; Black 98; Firmin on 217, 218, 227–​229; individual 104, 107, 228; political 89–​90, 93, 95 French language 4, 25, 103, 162, 189 French Revolution 40, 66, 67, 217, 229

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Index   241 Garvey, Marcus Mosiah 6, 17–​18, 132, 135, 136–​137, 139, 141, 155, 157 Gede 199, 200, 210 Geffrard, President Guillaume Fabre Nicolas 92, 98, 99 geography 4, 61, 68, 69, 75, 79, 81–​82, 83, 98, 99, 137, 140, 143, 185 geometric laws of creation 199, 201, 203 geopolitics 80, 81, 82 Ginen 199, 200, 202 Glissant, Édouard 20–​23, 24, 52 Gobineau, Count Arthur de 4, 12, 15, 61, 137, 195, 225–​226, 229; and nineteenth century legacy 47, 49, 51, 52, 53 government, Haitian see Haitian government Gran-​Mét 198–​199, 200–​201, 203, 205, 206–​207 Guilbaud, Tertulien 43 Haitian Atlantic humanism 4, 47, 50–​52 Haitian education 89, 103, 112, 215 Haitian epistemological idealism 198, 204, 205, 207, 209 Haitian epistemology 196, 198, 203–​209, 209, 210–​211 Haitian government 93, 110, 112, 148; of Boyer 108; of Dessalines 94, 95; of Geffrard 98; of Salnave 99; of Soulouque 96, 97 Haitian history 5, 51, 78, 87, 88, 91, 92–​97, 109 Haitian idealism 196, 198, 203–​209, 209, 210, 211, 213 Haitian independence 2, 14, 17, 30, 78, 130, 151, 218; and Firminism 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 98, 102, 106, 115 Haitian Indigenism 4, 78 Haitian liberalism 1, 86, 103–​104 Haitian mentality 2 Haitian modernity 6, 173 Haitian politics 3, 92–​97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107–​108, 114 Haitian Revolution 4, 14–​15, 34, 47, 51–​52, 67, 78, 92, 150–​153, 218 Haitian society, Firmin on pressing issues facing 2, 86–​118 Haitian turn 51

Haitian vodou 20, 148, 196, 198–​199, 200, 201–​203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 213 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 12, 210, 211; and multilineal evolution 173, 175, 183–​184, 186 Heidegger, Martin 11, 210, 211 heroism 15–​16, 17, 38, 39, 51, 129, 183; and Firminism 92, 93, 95, 96, 99 hierarchy, racial 133, 219, 222, 231 higher education 124, 158 Hine, Darlene Clark 155–​156, 156–​157, 161, 166 Hispanicity 18–​19 Hispanité 25–​26 Histoire du peuple d’Haiti 90 Hugo, Victor 43, 51 human actors 81, 83, 187, 208, 210–​211 human agency 198, 209, 211 human consciousness 174, 211, 212, 213 human essentialism 197, 213 human evolution 2, 176, 177, 182, 192n59 human family philosophy, of Malcom X 140–​141 human flourishing 2, 89, 103, 104 human origin, “Black Genesis” of 1–​2 human rights 5, 98, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 humanism 3, 7, 88, 92, 100, 230; Haitian Atlantic 4, 47, 50–​52 humanities 1, 2, 3, 7, 88, 158; universality of 195–​213, 209, 210 Hurbon, Laënnec 15–​16 hybridity 19, 47, 224 Hyppolite, President Louis Mondestin Florvil 40, 111, 113 idea of race 3, 11–​12, 15, 16–​18, 19, 26, 230, 231 idealism, Haitian 196, 198, 203–​209, 209, 210, 211, 213 ideology: anti-​racist 143; of difference and inequality 224; Firminism as 90, 91, 92, 115; Liberal Party 102; Negritude 129; Pan-​African 5–​6, 16, 128–​129, 136; race vindicationist 132; racist 7, 12, 19, 123, 222; see also Ethiopianism; social Darwinism Imhotep 155

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242 Index imperialism 2, 5, 123, 124, 148; European 34, 158, 160, 226; and privilege 227, 228, 229; and race and modernity 11, 12, 18, 26 independence 22; African 138, 148; Cuban 113; economic 106, 138; Haitian see Haitian independence Indianité 25–​26 Indigenism 4, 11, 19–​20, 78 Indigenous peoples 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 83 individual freedom 104, 107, 228 inequality, in nineteenth-​century French thought 217–​222 inferiority: African 137, 179; Black see Black inferiority; intellectual 100, 109, 151, 160; mental 100, 109, 151, 160; natural 7, 127, 226; racial see racial inferiority; of specific groups 223 intellectual inferiority 100, 109, 151, 160 intellectual racism 87 international relations entry point, to place equality 80 Islam 137, 139–​140, 140–​141, 142, 147, 148 Jacques I, Emperor 38, 78, 81, 92–​93, 93–​96, 129, 207 J’ai venge la race 77 James, C.L.R. 34, 40, 133, 157 Jamestown 69, 71 Janvier, Louis-​Joseph 15, 31, 48, 52, 103, 112, 114 jaw types 36–​37 Johnson, John H. 151 Joseph, Dr. Celucien 4344n1, 159, 162 Kant, Immanuel 12, 34, 47, 196, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210 Karem, Professor Jeff 124, 130–​131 lakous 201 Le Messager du Nord 107, 148 Leclerc expedition 30 Legba 199, 200, 210 Lesage, Imhotep 35–​36, 37 Lettres de Saint Thomas, Les 2, 112, 113, 161, 189 Liberal Party 5, 88, 91, 101–​102, 103–​104, 105, 107, 109 liberalism 1, 26, 86, 88, 90, 102, 103–​104

liberty 12, 51, 81, 96, 208 L’impot sur le Café 102 linguistic analysis, in Egyptology 165, 188 Little, Malcolm 5, 6, 132, 135–​145, 157 Lobban, Carolyn Fluer 31, 43–​44n1, 124, 158, 217, 221 Louverture, Toussaint 4, 17, 29–​44, 51, 65–​66 lwa yo 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204–​205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211 Maafa 128 Malcolm X 5, 6, 132, 135–​145, 157 Manigat, Leslie F. 91, 110–​111, 115 marginalization 11, 53, 57–​58n67, 106, 141, 144, 159, 160 maroons 78, 82, 148 Martí, José 18–​19, 52, 113, 130, 131 Mathurin, Owen Charles 124–​125, 131 mental inferiority 100, 109, 151, 160 mental slavery 94 mentalité haitienne 2 Merit Ptah 155 methodology, research 13, 83, 136, 154, 156, 167, 174, 198, 209, 211 methods, research 1, 26, 80–​81, 132, 220, 221–​222; and Black Atlantic 196, 198–​203, 206, 208, 211; and Egyptology 156, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167; and multilineal evolution 174, 175, 178; and nineteenth century legacy 46, 48, 49, 50, 53 métissage 24, 182 metropoles 22, 62–​78, 127 Mezu, Dr. Rose Ure 129 Mills, Charles W. 4, 11, 26 Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States, and the Republic of Haiti 4, 61–​85, 161 modernity: Black 196, 209; in Caribbean discourse 11–​27; European 6, 12, 26, 173; Haitian 6, 173; Western 12, 16, 18, 20, 25, 26 Moise, Claude 104–​105 Môle Saint Nicolas, Haiti 40, 41, 112–​113, 125 monogenism 47, 100, 177, 178, 179, 180, 221, 223 Monsieur Roosevelt, Président des Etats Unis et la République d’Haïti 4, 61–​85, 161

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Index   243 moral slavery 94 Mortillet, Gabriel 42, 48, 49, 56n28 Mouride brotherhood 147, 148 mulattoes 26, 38, 97, 101, 103, 107, 108, 224, 225 Müller, Friedrich Max 187, 188–​189 multilineal evolution 6, 173–​193 Muslims 137, 139–​140, 140–​141, 142, 147, 148 mutilated place 77 naming practices 69, 70, 79 nanm 205–​206, 208, 213 Nation of Islam (NOI) 139–​140, 141–​142, 143, 144 national consciousness 18, 19, 21–​22, 90, 102 national development 96, 106, 109 National Party 101, 103, 108, 109, 110 national reform 5, 88 national sovereignty 89, 95 natural equality 88, 222, 223–​225, 227 natural inequality 218, 225, 227 natural inferiority 7, 127, 226 natural selection, theory of 177, 182, 183, 186 natural world 182, 207 Négritude 3–​4, 29–​30, 38, 137, 149, 195, 197; and race and modernity 11, 19–​20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26; and race vindication 128–​129, 129–​130 New World 23, 62, 63, 77–​78, 124, 128, 129, 135, 139 New York 17, 73, 80–​81, 111, 124, 131, 140, 163 Nicholls, David 108, 160, 195, 196, 197 nineteenth-​century epistemology 33 Nkrumah, Kwame 17, 128–​129, 133, 139, 141, 157 NOI (Nation of Islam) 139–​140, 141–​142, 143, 144 noirisme 108, 137, 160, 196, 197, 198, 209, 213 noumenal world 205, 206, 207, 208, 209 “Old Scrappers” 153, 154, 157 On the coffee tax 102 ontology 7, 11, 98, 151, 224; and Black Atlantic 195, 204, 206, 208–​209, 210–​211, 212

organization 89, 91, 104, 182, 201; and sense of place 71, 74, 75–​76, 78, 80 Origin of Species 182, 221 Originists 155, 157 orthognathism 36, 36–​37 Ortiz, Fernando 19 Pan-​African Association 5, 16–​17, 125, 136, 137–​138 Pan-​African Conference (1900) 5, 57n63, 113–​114, 123–​124, 125, 131, 133 Pan-​African Congresses 17, 124, 147 Pan-​African ideology 5–​6, 16, 128–​129, 136 Pan-​Africanism 135–​136; birth of 128, 136–​139; in Black Atlantic 130–​132; definitions of 128, 138; and Malcolm X 141; and race vindication 132–​133 Pan-​Negroism 136 parallel historical evolution 6, 173, 180, 185 parallel-​mirrored world 201, 206, 210 Paris Anthropology Society see Société d’Anthropologie de Paris Parti Liberal 5, 88, 91, 101–​102, 103–​104, 105, 107, 109 Parti National 101, 103, 108, 109, 110 particularism 198 Paul, Edmond 90, 99, 101–​102, 108, 109 Péan, Leslie 43–​44n1, 91, 105, 112 Péan, Marc 91 peristyle 201, 202, 203 Pétion, President Alexandre 15, 27n11 phenomenological structuralism 7, 196, 198, 209–​213; see also Haitian epistemology; Haitian idealism Phillips, Wendell 34, 37, 39 philosophical entry point, to place equality 80 physical anthropology 48, 53, 220, 221 place, in Monsieur Roosevelt 61–​85 place equality 80 Plummer, Brenda Gayle 109, 160, 167 political activism 139, 149 political agency 103, 140 political freedom 89–​90, 93, 95 political liberalism 1, 88, 90 political stability 5, 88, 89, 102, 106 political theory 3, 4, 11, 12, 26, 88

42

244 Index politics, Haitian 3, 92–​97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107–​108, 114 polygenism 32, 47, 100, 177, 178, 187, 221, 223 Port-​au-​Prince, Haiti 31, 99, 105, 111, 114, 115, 162 positive anthropology 49, 217, 222 positivism: Comtean 6, 173, 174, 183–​184, 185, 217; emancipatory potential of 6, 173, 174–​181; epistemology of 178; limitations of 181–​187 potomitan 202, 203 practical consciousness 201, 206, 207, 211, 212 prejudice: color 40, 108; racial 97, 107–​113, 179 Price-​Mars, Jean 20, 129, 135; and Egyptology 149, 162, 163–​164; and Firminism 97, 99–​100, 101, 114, 115; and privilege 215, 216, 217; and racial equality 29–​30, 31, 32, 40, 43–​44n1 privilege, abolition of all 7, 215–​231 prognathism, in Maurin portrait of Toussaint Louverture 35, 36 public intellectual, Firmin as 1, 86, 87, 88, 89, 115 pure types 221 Quatrefages de Bréau, Jean Louis Armand de 31, 38, 177, 180 race: idea of 3, 230, 231; in nineteenth-​century French thought 217–​222; and race and modernity 11–​12, 15, 16–​18, 19, 26 race concept model 87 race thinking 218, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229 race vindication, struggle for 5, 132–​133 racial classification 223–​224, 227, 228 Racial Contract, The 26 racial difference 11, 12, 219, 220, 224, 226; and multilineal evolution 178, 179, 180, 182, 184, 185 racial domination 14 racial equality 33, 39, 54–​55n3, 96, 135, 179 racial essentialism 196, 197, 198, 209, 210, 217 racial hierarchy 133, 219, 222, 231 racial ideologies 7, 46, 228–​229

racial inequality 5, 50, 109, 174, 196; and privilege 216, 217, 222–​223, 225, 226–​227, 228, 229 racial inferiority 7, 12, 15, 68, 127; and racial equality 32, 34, 36, 38, 41 racial inferiorization 34 racial prejudice 97, 107–​113, 179 racial pride 6, 135, 136, 137, 138, 144, 150 racial superiority 12, 13, 14, 32, 34, 46 racial types 219, 221, 224, 225 racialization 11, 12, 35, 46, 108 racism: anti-​Black 20, 87, 112; anti​ see anti-​racism; ideology of 7, 12, 19, 123, 222; intellectual 87; scientific see scientific racism Reassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) 148 rebellious place 66 regional epistemology 13 Regnault, Félix 41, 42 religion 11, 12, 14, 19, 30, 88, 100, 140, 150, 179; and sense of place 66, 69, 73, 77; see also Ethiopianism; Islam; vodou Renan, Ernest 12, 179, 188, 196 research methodology see methodology, research research methods see methods, research resistance, to oppression 11, 16, 68, 71, 78, 82, 128, 131, 142 return to Africa 16 revolution, in Haiti see Haitian Revolution Rilleux, Norbert 151–​152 Royer, Clémence 41, 42, 177, 178, 182 Schoelcher, Victor 16, 52, 220, 222 scientific racism 4, 6, 19, 49, 51, 53, 143–​144, 173, 195, 226 “Scramble for Africa” 123, 133 segregation 74, 83, 128, 143, 223–​224 self-​determinism 6, 132, 143 Senghor, President Léopold Sédar 20, 92, 149 sense of place, in Monsieur Roosevelt 4, 61–​85 separatism 18, 140, 141, 143, 144 settlers, colonial 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 83, 137

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Index   245 single blueprint 180 Sixto, Maurice 77 skin color 14, 21, 37–​38, 39, 164 skull types 32, 37, 42, 43, 48, 49, 178 slave trade 11, 67, 148 slavery 7, 18, 19, 20, 26, 65, 67, 74, 77, 125, 126, 148, 152, 153; abolition of 12, 15, 30, 148, 153, 218, 228, 229; and degeneration of pure types 221; and freedom 227–​228; inequality of human races due to 195, 196, 197, 198; mental 94; and monogenesis 177; moral 94; opposition to 25, 50–​51, 66, 93; and polygenesis 179; and scientific debates about race 220–​221, 223–​224; see also enslavement; Haitian-​Atlantic humanism Smith, Matthew J. 103, 115 social control 68 social Darwinism 18, 158, 160, 166–​167, 177, 182, 192n59 social democracy 5, 86, 88, 89 social domination 226, 227 social evolution 2, 174, 183 social sciences, universality of 195–​213, 209, 210 social transformation 5, 88, 105 Société d’Anthropologie de Paris 215, 221, 222, 228; Firmin’s involvement with 30–​31, 32–​33, 40–​41, 48–​49, 54, 157–​158, 174, 177; and racialization 35, 36, 37–​38, 48 Soulouque, Emperor Faustin-​Élie 92, 93, 96–​97 sovereignty 2, 12, 80, 82; and Firminism 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 96, 102, 106, 112, 113, 115 space, in Monsieur Roosevelt 61–​85 spatial domination 82 spatial entanglement 74 spatial knowledge 79 spatial order 80 spatial relationships 62, 72–​73, 142 speech acts 65, 79 structurationism 198, 211, 213; see also phenomenological structuralism structure/​agency problematic 198, 209, 211 Sylvain, Benito 6, 16, 57n63, 124–​125, 131; correspondence with Firmin 5, 125–​127, 128, 133 Sylvain, Patrick 36, 37

symbolic oppression 68 symbolism 37, 70, 76, 96 technology 68 theory of knowledge 87, 88, 176 togetherness, vision of 14 Topinard, Paul 31, 32, 48, 56n28, 178, 221, 228 “tous les hommes sont l’homme” 43, 50–​52 transcendental idealism 198, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 209 Trouillot, Michel-​Rolph 102, 215, 216, 218, 219, 228–​229, 230 Tyner, James 140 tyranny 94, 96, 132 unification, of African states 148–​149 unified consciousness 208 uniform change, theory of 187–​189 unilineal model of evolution 6, 173 unitarian theory 179 unité de plan 180 universal brotherhood 88, 111, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 230 universal civilization 2, 86, 87, 137 universal development potential 185–​186 universal reason 1 universalism 7, 88, 90, 156, 173, 181, 183, 197, 198 universality, of social sciences and humanities 195–​213, 209, 210 usable space 64 Véran, Jean-​François 46, 56n27 Vilokan 201–​203, 203–​204, 204–​206, 206–​207 Vilokan idealism 196, 198, 203–​209, 209, 210, 211, 213 vindicationist intellectual tradition 132–​133, 149, 150–​153, 167 violence 11, 12, 181, 182 Virginia colony 71, 77–​78 vodou, Haitian see Haitian vodou Western domination 12, 14, 26 Western epistemology 87, 185 Western hemisphere 17, 81, 94, 128, 138 Western intellectual history

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246 Index Western modernity 12, 16, 18, 20, 25, 26 Westernization 65–​66, 77, 185 white supremacy 6, 7, 46, 87, 95, 98, 150, 156, 159, 211, 226 Whitney, W.D. 6, 173, 187, 188–​189

Williams, Henry Sylvester 5–​6, 16, 114, 135, 137–​138, 167; and race vindication 124, 125, 128, 131, 133 Wolof 149, 161, 165 Zea, Leopoldo 13