Anthropologist, Egyptologist, Politician and Journalist
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.[1][2] Firmin is best known for his book De l'égalité des races humaines (English: "On the Equality of Human Races"), which was published in 1885 as a rebuttal to French writer Count Arthur de Gobineau's work Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (English: "Essay on the Inequality of Human Races").[3] Gobineau's book asserted the superiority of the Aryan race 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.[4]
Biography
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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.[5] The political turmoil surrounding the new government of Lysius Salomon forced him into exile in Paris where he served as a diplomat.[6] During this time, he was admitted to the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris where he began writing De l'égalité des races humaines.[7]
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.[2]
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 and published in English as The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) in 2000, 115 years after its original publication. The text has been since been re-evaluated alongside foundational works in the field of anthropology published in the same era.[2]
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. He influenced Jean Price-Mars, the founder of Haitian ethnology and on American anthropologist Melville Herskovits.[10]
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.[7] Firmin sought to redefine the science of anthropology 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.[7]
Of the Equality of Human Races
In De l'égalité des races humaines, Firmin tackles two bases of existing theories on black inferiority in an effort to critique Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines. 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 Black Africans in Pharaonic Egypt. He then delves into the significance of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and ensuing achievements of Haitians such as Léon Audain 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.)[11]
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 and fellow Haitian Bénito Sylvain, he was the organizer of the First Pan-African Conference 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.[12]
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.[6] 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.[6]
Firmin was interested in creating political and social unity throughout the Caribbean.[13] 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.[13] 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
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 reinforce Firmin's anti-essentialist agenda first displayed in De l'égalité des races humaines.[14]
Bibliography
De l'égalité des races humaines (1885)
English translation: The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) (2000)
Haïti et la France (1891)
Une défense (1892)
Diplomate et diplomatie (1898)
M. Roosevelt, Président des États-Unis et la République d'Haïti (1905)
Chaar-Pérez, Khalila (Fall 2013). ""A Revolution of Love": Ramón Emeterio Betances, Anténor Firmin, and Affective Communities in the Caribbean". The Global South. 7 (2, Dislocations): 11–36. doi:10.2979/globalsouth.7.2.11. S2CID201787161.
Dash, J. Michael (Summer 2004). "Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin's Letters from St. Thomas". Research in African Literatures. 35 (2, Haiti, 1804-2004: Literature, Culture, and Art): 44–53. doi:10.1353/ral.2004.0039. JSTOR3821344.
——— (2013). "Firmin, Anténor". In Mason, Patrick L. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (2nd ed.). Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Archived from the original on 2024-02-02 – via Encyclopedia.com.
Lara, Oruno D. (2007). Tracées d'historien (in French). Interviewed by Inez Fisher-Blanchet. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN9782296049321.
Magloire-Danton, Gerarde (September 2005). "Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism". Small Axe. 9 (2, Profondes et nombreuses: Haiti, History, Culture, 1804-2004): 150–170. doi:10.1215/-9-2-150.
Péan, Leslie J. R. (2012). Comprendre Anténor Firmin: une inspiration pour le XXIe siècle (in French). Port-au-Prince: Éditions de l'Université d'État d'Haiti. ISBN9789993557500.
Schutt-Ainé, Patricia, ed. (1994). "Anténor Firmin [1850–1911] theoretician, commentator, novelist". Haiti: A Basic Reference Book; General Information on Haiti. Miami: Librairie Au Service de la Culture. p. 95. ISBN9780963859907. OL1444493M.
Stieber, Chelsea (2020). "Nationals and Liberals, 1904/1906". Haiti's Paper War: Post–Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954. America and the Long 19th Century. Vol. 25. New York: New York University Press. pp. 201–226. doi:10.18574/nyu/9781479802135.003.0007. ISBN9781479802166. JSTORj.ctv1sjwnsn.10.
Further reading
Becket, Greg (June 2017). "The abolition of all privilege: Race, equality, and freedom in the work of Anténor Firmin". Critique of Anthropology. 37 (2): 160–178. doi:10.1177/0308275X17694945.
Bernasconi, Robert (April 2019). "A Most Dangerous Error: The Boasian Myth of a Knock-Down Argument Against Racism". Angelaki. 24 (2, The African Other: Philosophy, Justice and the Self): 92–103. doi:10.1080/0969725X.2019.1574082.
Joseph, Celucien L.; Mocombe, Paul C., eds. (2021). Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities: Anténor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition. New York & London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003167037. ISBN9781003167037.
Leonard, Douglas W. (2015). "Writing Against the Grain: Anténor Firmin and the Refutation of Nineteenth-Century European Race Science". In Radcliffe, Kendahl; Scott, Jennifer; Werner, Anja (eds.). Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 27–46. doi:10.14325/mississippi/9781628461558.003.0001 (inactive 1 November 2024). ISBN9781626740839.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
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