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i

Reconstructing the Social Sciences

and Humanities

Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–​1911) was the reigning public intellectual and pol-
itical critic in Haiti in the nineteenth century. He was the first “Black anthropolo-
gist” 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, colo-
nial 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.
ii

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
iii

Reconstructing the Social

Sciences and Humanities
Anténor Firmin, Western Intellectual
Tradition, and Black Atlantic
Tradition

Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and

Paul C. Mocombe
iv

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
v

For Students of Haitian history and literature, whose devo-

tion 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
vi
vi

Contents

Introduction: Firmin, Global History, and the

End of Race  1
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  11

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  29
PA U L B . M I L L E R

3 Reinventing Europe: Joseph Anténor Firmin and the

Legacy of the Nineteenth Century  46
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  61
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  86
C E L U C I E N L . JO SE P H
vi
newgenprepdf

viii Contents
PART 2
Firmin, Black Internationalism, and Pan-​Africanism  121

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

Race Vindication  123
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  135
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  171

9 Firmin and the Laws of Multilineal Evolution  173

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  195
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  215
G R E G B E C K E TT

List of Contributors  233

Index  237
1

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

Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–​1911) was the reigning public intellec-

tual and political critic in Haiti in the nineteenth century. Firmin was
the first “Black anthropologist” and “Black Egyptologist” to decon-
struct the Western interpretation of global history and challenge the ideo-
logical 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 nine-
teenth 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 (eco-
nomic) 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
2

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 his-
tory and the historical narrative about ancient African history and cul-
ture. 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 post-
colonial imagination resulting in a new positive narrative of human soci-
eties, 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 signifi-
cance 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 epis-
temology, 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 pol-
itical history associated with the rise of dictatorship and political totali-
tarianism in the Caribbean nation. In his political career as a statesman,
diplomat, and ultimately a candidate to the Haitian presidency, Firmin
3

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 cul-
ture 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 reexamin-
ation 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 geograph-
ical 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 aca-
demic 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
4

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 trans-
historical constellation suggests that Louverture, at the dawn of the nine-
teenth 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 espe-
cially 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,
5

Introduction 5
and intellectual context of Haitian history and the Haitian society. In par-
ticular, it situates Firmin’s political vision and democratic ideals within
Haiti’s Liberal Party and democratic socialism—​toward social transform-
ation, 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 con-
temporary 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 cul-
minate 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 per-
sons of African descent have engaged in intellectual, cultural, or polit-
ical 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 prom-
inent figures such as Anténor Firmin, Henry Sylvester Williams, and
6

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 systemat-
ically 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 coloniza-
tion 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 intel-
lectual 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 engage-
ment 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 poten-
tial of Comtean positivism. Its emphasis on the universal and uniform
action of a finite set of laws allowed Firmin to unseat the prejudice under-
lying scientific racism. However, this is not the whole story. As a phil-
osophy 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 evolu-
tion 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.
7

Introduction 7
In the next chapter, Paul Mocombe argues that Anténor Firmin’s cri-
tique 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 intel-
lectual 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 argu-
ment 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 scholar-
ship on Joseph Anténor Firmin. In particular, we hope the academic com-
munity in the Anglophone world will find this book, the first published
monograph on Firmin in the English language, both accessible and
worthy of reading.
8
9

Part 1

Firmin, Haitian History,

and Caribbean Intellectual
Heritage
01
1

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 over-
view 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 imperi-
alism and colonialism, the Caribbean has been marked by violence, the
slave trade, dehumanization, racialization, marginalization, and exploit-
ation of European colonial modernity.1 As such, its historicity carries the
traces of an ontological and anthropological fissure due to its racial spe-
cificity 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 crea-
ture 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 margin-
alization 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, legit-
imation, expansion, and exploitation in the context of the Caribbean.
Racial discourse served as one of the tools of domination weaponized by
21

12 Glodel Mezilas
the colonial order. In this way, the Caribbean subject is born from vio-
lence, suffering, and a lack of humanity that modern philosophy and the
social sciences (notably nineteenth-​century anthropology) helped legit-
imize 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 mod-
ernity in which race determines everything.4
Edward Said shows the complicity of culture and domination in
European thought.5 Hannah Arendt puts nineteenth-​ century imperi-
alism and racism into conversation.6 Aimé Césaire reveals the resem-
blance 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 mod-
ernity and postmodernity in Western thought do not address the racial
paradigm, the very ideological basis upon which Europe legitimized its
31

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 justifica-
tion, 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 dis-
semination, 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 epis-
temological mutations within the region into account.
Likewise, approaching the question of race according to the his-
tory 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
41

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 his-
torically 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, justi-
fied, 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 mod-
ernity, 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 construc-
tion 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 hence-
forth 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 rejec-
tion of phenotypical distinction, and the assigning of skin color. Here,
Black does not refer to a racial or ethnic category, but a human condi-
tion. 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 ideo-
logical 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 mod-
ernity. 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,
51

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, super-
iority, 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 decon-
struct 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 effect-
ively 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
61

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 begin-
ning 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 confer-
ence 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
71

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 cer-
tain 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
81

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 con-
sciousness 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 ideolo-
gies, 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 rejec-
tion 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 indi-
genous 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.
91

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 illus-
trate 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 anthro-
pology 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 domin-
ation (North American in 1915) and sought to rediscover the hidden
values of popular beliefs and traditions. Indigénisme entailed a search
02

20 Glodel Mezilas
for Haitian cultural authenticity through the critique of Western mod-
ernity, 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 iden-
tification 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 polit-
ical 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 plan-
tation system in the Americas.

Antillanité and créolisation discourses in Glissant

The paradigms of antillanité and créolisation articulate a radical cri-
tique 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”
12

Race and Modernity in the Caribbean Discourse 21

colonization. The terms créolisation and antillanité were used in reac-
tion 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 lan-
guage, 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 insu-
larity 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
2

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 com-
pletely 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 indivis-
ible.”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
32

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 elem-
ents 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,
42

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 cha-
otic arrangement born from “the confluence of several cultures, several
languages, and several religions.”33 Their ideas are compiled in the col-
lective [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 know-
ledge 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:
52

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 civiliza-
tion, of the legitimation of the extinction of the Caribbean, of the
nègre/​slave, of the idea of one …), and subterraneously diffuse mul-
tiple 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 prem-
ises 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
62

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 col-
lective 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 incorpor-
ation of the idea of race in philosophy presupposes an epistemological
and political rupture.
72

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).
82

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.
92

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
03

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 unapologetic-
ally 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 “trem-
bling 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 obser-
vance 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 compara-
tive 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 con-
stellation suggests that Louverture, at the dawn of the nineteenth cen-
tury, 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 context-
ualize Firmin’s presence and participation in the Société d’Anthropologie
de Paris, the intellectual community with which Firmin’s book was in
13

“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 tran-
scription 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 appro-
priate 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 rele-
vance 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 the-
matic 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 histor-
ical 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 par-
celed up Africa for their civilizing missions and colonial conquest (Fluehr-​
Lobban, xxxv). Firmin’s arguments, especially the long chapter asserting
23

32 Paul B. Miller
the specifically Black African racial demographic of ancient Egyptian civ-
ilization, “had provoked a scandal,” according to Price-​Mars, though it
appears that he is speaking conjecturally (Price-​Mars, 155). In the his-
torical 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 apothe-
osis 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 mono-
graph, 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 note-
worthy 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.
3

“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 “emi-
nent” 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 con-
sider 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 cen-
tury 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
43

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, historiograph-
ically speaking, to Toussaint than we might at first assume. Almost every-
thing we know about Toussaint Louverture was in fact filtered through a
nineteenth-​century lens.
Daniel Desormeaux provides just one example of the way this his-
toriographic 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 know-
ledge. 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.
53

“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 por-
trait 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 pro-
file, 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
63

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 infer-
iority. 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 prog-
nathic), there was also a veritable frenzy in French anthropology after
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