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ABSTRACT
Haitian intellectual Anténor Firmin is seldom recognised for his contribution to the social sciences outside of the Caribbean. Yet, as a member of the Société d'anthropologie de Paris, Firmin authored a robust critique of the discipline at a moment when it was most invested in North Atlantic racist and colonial politics. Rereading his 1885 De l'égalité des races humaines as a work of intellectual and political indiscipline, this article demonstrates how Firmin's unique engagement with anthropology has led to an enduring problem of formal and substantial illegibility, one largely responsible for its silencing in the history of the discipline.
Disclosure Statement
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Notes
1 Following Alice Conklin (Citation2013, 5–6), I distinguish between on the one hand ‘racial science’ as a field of scientific inquiry built around the notion of race, and on the other ‘scientific racism’ as an instrumentalization of the methods and discourse of science to racist ends. For a brief yet capacious summary of the evolution of scientific racism into eugenics, see Robert Sussman (Citation2014, chap. 2).
2 Originally published in 1853–1855, Gobineau’s Essai had been reedited in 1884, two years after the author’s death, but it was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that the book was granted a new political afterlife – both in France during the Dreyfus Affair and in Germany with the rise of Nazism – in large part due to Vacher de Lapouge’s work. On Vacher de Lapouge, see Jennifer Michael Hecht (Citation2000) and Pierre-André Taguieff (Citation2005).
3 On the significance of this article in the history of the social sciences, see Laurent Mucchielli (89–90). For a thorough analysis of Manouvrier’s work and intellectual engagement, see Hecht (Citation2003, chap. 6).
4 In an insightful yet cursory remark, Robert Bernasconi writes that, although Firmin likely ‘recognized the emptiness and bias of the claims of its most prominent members and decided to confront them on their own terms by studying their works in what must have been a frenzy of activity on his part,’ it ultimately seems like ‘his aim was not to persuade them to change their minds […] as if in his eyes they were less a jury to be persuaded than criminals to be convicted’ (Citation2008, 382–383)
5 Trouillot spoke of ‘unthinkability’ in relation to the Haitian Revolution and the failure of Western epistemological categories to conceive of its possibility, both as it was happening and after traces were found in the archival record (Citation1995, 73–74).
6 The English translation of De l’égalité des races was completed by Asselin Charles and published in Citation2000 by University of Illinois Press, with an introduction by anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban who was instrumental in its dissemination within U.S. academic circles and beyond. In fact, two new editions of the book were published in French following the release of the English translation: one introduced by Ghislaine Géloin and published in Paris by L’Harmattan in 2003; another introduced by Jean Métellus and published in Montréal by Mémoire d’encrier in 2005. In addition, a Spanish translation by Aurora Fibla Madrigal was published in 2013 by the Cuban press Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Prior to these translations and reeditions, there only existed three versions of Firmin’s text: the original and two Haitian editions published in 1968 and 1985 by Panorama and Fardin, respectively.
7 David Scott (Citation2004, 83) defines Black vindicationism as ‘a practice of providing evidence to refute a disagreeable or incorrect claim and a practice of reclamation, and, indeed, of redemption of what has been denied. This is why moral indignation – indeed, outrage – is most often the tone of black vindicationist discourse’. On Firmin’s role in the development of Pan-Africanism, see Oruno D. Lara (Citation2000).
8 For a complete biography of Firmin, see Jean Price-Mars (Citation1978).
9 Trained as a physician in Haiti and France, Janvier had become a member of the SAP just two years prior. As illustrated by Firmin’s discussion of Janvier’s achievements (Citation1885, 464–468), the latter was already an established intellectual at the time, and his recognition would only grow wider. For a condensed yet detailed overview of Janvier’s life and oeuvre, see Yves Chemla (Citation2005).
10 Aside from a few exceptions (see for example Carole Reynaud-Paligot [Citation2021, 72–75]), most major works of historiography on the subject (including Hecht [Citation2003], Blanckaert [Citation2009], and Conklin [Citation2013]) do not mention his work or name.
11 This gesture is far too common among scholars for the following list of references to be even remotely complete. See, for example, Price-Mars (Citation1978, 150), Laënnec Hurbon (Citation1984, 276), Pradel Pompilus (Citation1990, 17), Léon-François Hoffman (1997-Citation1998, 72), Ghislaine Géloin (Citation2003, xii), Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (Citation2000, 459), and Jean Métellus (Citation2005, ix). For exceptions to the rule, see Robert Bernasconi (Citation2008, 373), Daniel Desormeaux (Citation2016, 28), and Greg Beckett (Citation2017, 170).
12 Developed in a meditation on Haiti’s perceived ‘oddity’, Trouillot’s notion of exceptionality is helpful to understand how the ‘uniqueness’ of Firmin’s work may be misconstrued as ‘erratic’ and therefore ‘unexplainable’ (Citation1990, 6).
13 Price-Mars was perhaps the first to denounce a tendency to undermine Firmin’s intellectual project on the basis of his partially self-taught formation: ‘Autodidacte ? Soit, tant qu’il s’agit de la haute et profonde culture intellectuelle si diversifiée qui le distingua. Mais, ce vaste savoir reposait sur une très solide base classique’ (Citation1978, 17). On the topic of autodidacticism in De l’égalité des races, see Desormeaux (Citation2016, 36–38).
14 According to Peter Burke’s study of the great figures of polymathic thought in North Atlantic intellectual history, the nineteenth century was marked by ‘the era of the “man of letters”’ and ‘the age of territoriality’ (see Citation2020, 83–157).
15 According to Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Comte’s project ‘devait englober toutes les activités humaines […] et finalement s’imposer comme la grande science de l’humanité venant compléter le système des sciences positives’ (Citation1984, 347).
16 In his 1851–1854 Système de politique positive, Comte had disparaged those ‘prétendus penseurs qui […] se servent maintenant des races comme leurs prédécesseurs faisaient des climats, pour se donner, à peu de frais, une apparence scientifique’ (Citation1852, 368). For a nuanced account on the place of race in Comte’s oeuvre, see Mary Pickering (Citation1998, 73–74) and Angèle Kremer-Marietti (Citation1982, 133–134).
17 On the SEP and the discussions on the abolition of slavery it hosted in 1847, see Jan Goldstein (Citation2015, 6–10).
18 According to Fricker, there are two forms of epistemic injustice – ‘testimonial’ and ‘hermeneutical’ – both of which can have deeply harmful and dehumanizing effects. ‘To be wronged in one’s capacity as a knower,’ Fricker explains, ‘is to be wronged in a capacity essential to human value. When one is undermined or otherwise wronged in a capacity essential to human value, one suffers an intrinsic injustice. The form that this intrinsic injustice takes specifically in cases of testimonial injustice is that the subject is wronged in her capacity as a giver of knowledge. The capacity to give knowledge to others is one side of that many-sided capacity so significant in human beings: namely, the capacity for reason. […] When someone suffers testimonial injustice, they are degraded qua knower, and they are symbolically degraded qua human’ (Citation2007, 44).
19 While cultural anthropologists have long acknowledged their original debt to literature and the humanities by reclaiming figures such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, or Rousseau as forefathers of their discipline, we must not forget that late-nineteenth-century anthropologists still privileged a biocentric understanding of the ‘science of Man’ in relation to which cultural forms and practices bore little to no relevance at all. In France, the reconstruction of a humanistic genealogy is best exemplified by Claude-Lévi Strauss who claimed both Montaigne and Rousseau as founders of cultural anthropology (Lévi-Strauss Citation1963 & Citation2016). In the United States, it is illustrated by Ruth Benedict’s famous presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in which she returned to Montaigne and Shakespeare to ‘emphasiz[e] the common ground which is shared by the humanities and by anthropology so soon as it includes the mind and behavior of men in its definition of culture’ (Benedict Citation1948, 593).
20 In Haiti, Firmin had received a solid education in classical studies from Jules Neff, a former classmate of Hippolyte Taine’s at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris who had come to teach humanities classes at the Lycée national du Cap-Haitien. According to Price-Mars, Firmin ‘a travaillé [avec lui] plus de deux ans après avoir parcouru le programme de la classe de rhétorique en poussant ses études plus loin que d’ordinaire’ (Citation1978, 17–18).
21 Regarding scientific discourses on racial mixing and/as monstrosity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, see Blanckaert (Citation2003).
22 Firmin’s decision to start with Delorme was particularly remarkable in that the two of them, as former political rivals, had a history of sparring in heated and even hostile journalistic feuds (see Price-Mars [Citation1978, 96–111]).
23 Senghor used the label ‘Défense et illustration de la négritude’ (Citation1977, 55) to describe Abbé Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des nègres.
24 For an important analysis of Firmin, Delorme, and Janvier as ‘Caribbean race men’, see Daut (Citation2016).
25 Samuel Morton, one of the chief advocates of the polygenist and proslavery American School of Anthropology, was largely responsible for the whitening of ancient Egyptians. In a text read at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society on December 16, 1842, he declared that the ‘valley of the Nile, both in Egypt and in Nubia, was originally peopled by a branch of the Caucasian race’ and that ‘Negroes were numerous in Egypt, but their social position in ancient times was the same that it is now, that of servants and slaves’ (1844, 65–66). For a brief overview of the American School of Anthropology, see Lee D. Baker (Citation2010, 10–11).
26 See for example the works of earlier Haitian polemicists, including Vastey (Citation1816, 32–34). On the debated racial identity of the population of Ancient Egypt, see Alain Froment (Citation1994) and Gilles Boëtsch (Citation1995).
27 In the words of Théophile Obenga, Firmin’s work testified ‘to the cultural, racial, and linguistic kinship of Pharaonic Egypt with the rest of black Africa’ (Citation2008, 141). Hence his recent heralding as ‘the first “Black anthropologist” and “Black Egyptologist” to deconstruct the Western interpretation of global history’ (Joseph Citation2021, 1). On Firmin’s role in the development of Egyptology, see also Célucien Joseph (Citation2014).
28 By pointing to a historical moment of racial sight, Firmin’s analysis helps to retrace the emergence and development of what W. J. T. Mitchell has called ‘a mode of race as a symbolic-imaginary, verbal-visual complex’ (Citation2012, 20).
29 To further assess Firmin’s comment on the legal-fictional economy of Roman slavery, see Orlando Patterson (Citation1982, 29–31).
30 For some of the key interventions of that historical moment, see James Clifford and George Marcus (Citation1986), James Clifford (Citation1988), and Clifford Geertz (Citation1988). Since then, the relationship between anthropology and literature has received much scholarly attention from literature specialists and anthropologists alike. See, for example, Vincent Debaene (Citation2010), Anke Birkenmaier (Citation2016), Tim Watson (Citation2018), Jean Jamin (Citation2018), and Justin Izzo (Citation2019).
31 In that respect, we can only understand Asselin Charles’s predicament when, in his ‘Note on the Translation’ of De l’égalité des races, he states that the first of ‘three major challenges […] was to find a way of reproducing in modern English Firmin’s modulated style, which is at once lyrically poetic, scientifically technical, and passionately polemical’ (Citation2000, ix).
32 On the genesis of ‘literary cannibalism’ and its distinction from intertextuality, see Felisa Vergara Reynolds (Citation2022).
33 With regard to the discourse of objectivity, Louis Althusser offered an interesting perspective on the relationship between science, subjectivity, and ideology: ‘l’auteur, en tant qu’il écrit les lignes d’un discours qui prétend à être scientifique, [est] complètement absent, comme “sujet”, de “son” discours scientifique (car tout discours scientifique est par définition un discours sans sujet, il n’y a de “Sujet de la science” que dans une idéologie de la science)’ (Citation1970, 29–30).
34 If the role reversal of the observed observer is well known to anthropologists who constantly experience it in the field, Firmin’s situation proved infinitely more complex insofar as he also embodied the racialized – in the Fanonian sense of dehumanized – observed-observer whose status as a subject was contested. In that sense, his work both exemplifies and complicates the diagnosis of autobiographical anxiety which Geertz identified in the works of anthropologists who, decades later, would often sign their texts with mentions of ‘I was there’ or ‘this happened to me’ (Citation1988, 13).
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Bastien Craipain
Bastien Craipain is an Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University, where his research and teaching lie at the intersection of literature and the social sciences. He is the author of several essays on French and Francophone Caribbean intellectual histories and cultures, including two forthcoming book chapters on Louis Joseph Janvier’s antiracist work as a physician and anthropologist (in Haiti for the Haitians, edited by Brandon R. Byrd and Chelsea Stieber, Liverpool University Press, 2023) and on late-nineteenth-century Haitian novels (forthcoming in A Cambridge History of Haitian Literature, edited by Marlene Daut and Kaiama L. Glover). Currently, he is working on a book project that examines the critical contribution of Haitian social thought and literature to the discipline of anthropology in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Atlantic world.