Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin (18 October 1850 – 19 September 1911), better known as Anténor Firmin, was a
Haitian barrister and philosopher, pioneering
anthropologist, journalist, and politician.
Firmin is best known for his book ''De l'égalité des races humaines'' ( en, "On the Equality of Human Races"), which was published in 1885 as a rebuttal to French writer Count
Arthur de Gobineau
Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (; 14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat who is best known for helping to legitimise racism by the use of scientific racist theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Ary ...
's work ''
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines'' ( en, "Essay on the Inequality of Human Races"). Gobineau's book asserted the superiority of the
Aryan race
The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people of Proto-Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping. The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by modern I ...
and the inferiority of Blacks and other people of color. Firmin's book argued the opposite, that "all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal". He was marginalized at the time for his beliefs that all human races were equal.
Biography
Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin was born as the third generation of a post-independent Haiti in a working-class family. Firmin advanced quickly at his studies and started teaching when he was 17. He studied accounting and law. He found early jobs Haitian Customs Office and as a clerk for a private business. He quit his clerical position to teach Greek, Latin and French.
He was close to the liberal party and he started the newspaper “Le Messager du Nord”. The political turmoil surrounding the new government of General Salomon forced him into exile in Paris
where he served as a diplomat. During this time, he was admitted to the
Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris where he began writing ''De L'Egalite des Races Humaines''.
Firmin attended meetings of the Société as a regular member. But he was silenced by a racialist
physical anthropology dominant at the time and due to racism. The transcripts of the Société’s deliberations included in the ''Mémoires'' show that Firmin rose to speak only twice, and on both occasions he was silenced by racialist or racist comments.
Work
Anténor Firmin's major work, ''De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive)'' was published in Paris in 1885. Its importance was unrecognized for several decades. The recovered text was translated by Haitian scholar
Asselin Charles in 2000. It was published in English as ''The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology),'' 115 years after its original publication. Today he is considered one of the most important contributors to anthropology.
Firmin pioneered the integration of race and
physical anthropology and may be the first Black anthropologist. His work was recognized not only in Haiti but also among African scholars as an early work of
négritude
''Négritude'' (from French "Nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as "Blackness") is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African ...
. He influenced
Jean Price-Mars
Jean Price-Mars (15 October 1876 – 1 March 1969) was a Haitian doctor, teacher, politician, diplomat, writer, and ethnographer.[ethnology
Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). ...](_blank)
and on American anthropologist
Melville Herskovits
Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an American anthropologist who helped to first establish African and African Diaspora studies in American academia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from A ...
.
Following the ideas of
Auguste Comte, Firmin was a stark positivist who believed that the empiricism used to study humanity was a counter to the speculative philosophical theories about the inequalities of races.
Firmin sought to redefine the science of
Anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
in his work. He critiqued certain conventionally-held aspects of anthropology, such as craniometry and racialist interpretations of human physical data. He was the first to point out how racial typologies failed to account for the successes of those of mixed race as well as one of the first to state an accurate scientific basis for skin pigmentation.
''Of the Equality of Human Races''
In his best known work, ''De l'égalité des races humaines'' ("Of the Equality of Human Races") published in 1885, Firmin tackles two bases of existing theories on black inferiority in an effort to critique Gobineau's ''De l'Inégalité des Races Humaines'' ("Of the Inequality of Human Races"). On the one hand, Firmin challenges the idea of brain size or cephalic index as a measure of human intelligence and on the other he reasserts the presence of African Blacks in Pharaonic Egypt. He then delves into the significance of the
Haitian Revolution of 1804 and ensuing achievements of Haitians such as
Léon Audain
Léon Audain (December 17, 1862 – September 22, 1930) was a Haitian physician and professor who focused his studies mainly towards bacteriology and parasitology. He published many works during his career, including ''Fièvres Intertropicales, Di ...
and Isaïe Jeanty in medicine and science and Edmond Paul in the social sciences. (Both Audain and Jeanty had obtained prizes from the
Académie Nationale de Médecine.)
Founder of Pan-Africanism
Firmin is one of three Caribbean men who launched the idea of Pan-Africanism at the end of the 19th century to combat colonialism in Africa. As a candidate in Haiti's 1902 presidential elections, he declared that the Haitian state should "serve in the rehabilitation of Africa". Along with Trinidadian lawyer
Henry Sylvester Williams
Henry Sylvester-Williams (24 March 1867 or 15 February 186926 March 1911) was a Trinidadian lawyer, activist, councillor and writer who was among the founders of the Pan-African movement.
As a young man, Williams travelled to the United States ...
and fellow Haitian
Bénito Sylvain
Benito Sylvain (born Marie-Joseph Benoît d'Artagnan Sylvain; 21 March 1868 – 3 January 1915) was a Haitian journalist, diplomat, lawyer. He was also of the organizers of the 1900 Pan-African Conference.
Sylvain pathed the connection between ...
, he was the organizer of the
First Pan-African Conference
The First Pan-African Conference was held in London from 23 to 25 July 1900 (just prior to the Paris Exhibition of 1900 "in order to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events").Ramla Bandele"Pan-African Conference in 1900", Article ...
which took place in London in 1900. That conference launched the Pan-Africanism movement.
W. E. B. Du Bois attended the conference and was put in charge of drafting the general report. After the conference, five pan-African congresses were held in the 20th century, which eventually led to the creation of the African Union.
Firmin was invested in the three main elements of Pan-Africanist thought: the rejection of the postulate of race inequality, proof that Africans were capable of civilization, and examples of successful Africans producing knowledge in diverse fields.
In looking to move away from the biological understanding of race, Firmin's scientific approach was informed by the idea of a Black Egypt as the source of Greek civilization.
Pan-Caribbeanism
Anténor Firmin devised between 1875 and 1898 a Caribbean Confederation project which envisioned the unification of
Cuba
Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
,
Haiti, the
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with ...
,
Jamaica
Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...
and
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico (; abbreviated PR; tnq, Boriken, ''Borinquen''), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico ( es, link=yes, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, lit=Free Associated State of Puerto Rico), is a Caribbean island and unincorporated ...
.
Firmin was interested in creating political and social unity throughout the Caribbean.
This can be seen through his relationship with Puerto Rican intellectual and physician
Ramon Emeterio Betances. The pair first met in a meeting of the Society of Latin American Unity, an organisation that served as a social and political network for exiles from
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...
.
It is here where they discussed the ideals of political sovereignty throughout the region. Unlike other icons from the Cuban and Puerto Rican separatist movements, Betances celebration of the
Haitian Revolution countered those who did not see Haiti as an ideal revolutionary model, thus excluding it in their own plans for a Hispanic Caribbean federation.
''Letters from St. Thomas''
After a failed bid for presidency in 1902, Firmin was sent to live in exile in St. Thomas. In his last work, ''Letters from St. Thomas,'' Firmin remaps Haiti in the archipelago of the Americas, outlining its significance to the region as a whole. The letters reinforces Firmin's anti-essentialist agenda first displayed in ''L'Egalite des Races Humaines''.
Bibliography
French
*''De l'égalité des races humaines'' - published 1885
* ''Haïti et la France'' - published 1891
* ''Une défense'' - published 1892
* ''Diplomate et diplomatie'' - published 1898
* ''M. Roosevelt, Président des États-Unis et la République d'Haïti'' - published 1905
* ''Lettres de Saint-Thomas'' - published 1910
English
* The Equality of the Human Races: Positivist Anthropology, Translated from the French by Asselin Charles with introduction by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban.
Secondary literature
* Beckett, Greg. (2017). ‘The abolition of all privilege: Race, equality, and freedom in the work of Anténor Firmin’. Critique of Anthropology 37.2: 160–178.
*
Bernasconi, Robert. (2008). ‘A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a philosopher against racism’. Patterns of Prejudice 42.4–5: 365–383.
* Bernasconi, Robert. (2019). ‘A most dangerous myth’.
Angelaki
''Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1993. It covers "work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies." Since 19 ...
24.2: 92–103.
*Douglass W. Leonard, “Writing Against the Grain: Antenor Firmin and the Refutation of Nineteenth Century European Race Science”, in ''Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond'', edited by Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner, University Press of Mississippi.
*
Boas, Franz. (1911). Mind of primitive man. New York: Macmillan.
* Boas, Franz. (1940). Race, language and culture. New York: Macmillan.
* Charity-Hudley, Anne H., Christine Mallinson, & Mary Bucholtz. (In press). ‘Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession’. Language 96.4. To appear December 2020.
*Drouin-Hans, Anne-Marie,
Hierarchy of Races, Hierarchy in Gender Anténor Firmin and
Clémence Royer
Clémence Royer (21 April 1830 – 6 February 1902) was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's ' ...
". Ludus Vitalis.
*Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn, '
Anténor Firmin and Haiti’s contribution to anthropology', Gradhiva.
Notes
References
*
*Joseph, Celucien L. From Toussaint to Price-Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)
* Fluehr‑Lobban, Carolyn, (2018)
« A 19th Century Haitian Pioneering Anthropologist: An Intellectual Biography of Anténor Firmin »in Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie
Further reading
Antenor Firmin predicted America’s first Black president in 1885! by Carolyn Fluehr-LobbanAnténor Firmin biographypublished by
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
.
External links
''Une Défense''in the
Digital Library of the Caribbean
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is an international digital library operated collaboratively by the contributing partners.
Partners
Current partners continue to grow on a regular basis and are listed on thdLOC Partner Page Partners in ...
''M. Roosevelt, Président des Etats-Unis et la République d'Haïti''in the
Digital Library of the Caribbean
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is an international digital library operated collaboratively by the contributing partners.
Partners
Current partners continue to grow on a regular basis and are listed on thdLOC Partner Page Partners in ...
Anténor Firminat Île en île . .
at BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris, 2018.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firmin, Antenor
1850 births
1911 deaths
Haitian anthropologists
Haitian educators
Haitian journalists
Government ministers of Haiti
Haitian non-fiction writers
Haitian male writers
People from Cap-Haïtien
Haitian pan-Africanists
African Union
Male non-fiction writers