Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities
Anténor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition

Contributor(s)
Joseph, Celucien L. (editor)
Mocombe, Paul C. (editor)
Language
EnglishAbstract
Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–1911) was the reigning public intellectual and political critic in Haiti in the nineteenth century. He was the first “Black anthropologist” and “Black Egyptologist” to deconstruct the Western interpretation of global history and challenge the ideological construction of human nature and theories of knowledge in the Western social sciences and the humanities. As an anti-racist intellectual and cosmopolitan thinker, Firmin’s writings challenge Western ideas of the colonial subject, race achievement, and modernity’s imagination of a linear narrative based on the false premises of social evolution and development, colonial history and epistemology, and the intellectual evolution of the Aryan-White race. Firmin articulated an alternative way to study global historical trajectories, the political life, human societies and interactions, and the diplomatic relations and dynamics between the nations and the races.
Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities is the first full-length book devoted to Joseph Anténor Firmin. It reexamines the importance of his thought and legacy, and its relevance for the twenty-first century’s culture of humanism, and the continuing challenge of race and racism.
Keywords
Pan-African movement,scientific racism,Humanism,Pan-Africanism,Haiti,The Equality of the Human Races,racial equality,racism,Joseph Antenor Firmin,Anthropology,African literature,Black Atlantic Tradition,Victor Schoelcher,Toussaint Louverture,Jean Price Mars,Haitian Revolution,Black Public Intellectual,Jean Jacques Dessalines,Afrocentric Paradigm,Pan-African Association,Haitian Intellectual,Caribbean Intellectual,Haitian History,Black African Origin,Mulattoes,Multilineal Evolution,Caribbean Discourse,Multiple Developmental Trajectories,Haitian Society,Haitian People,Haitian Identity,Afrocentric Scholars,Black Anthropologist,Unilineal Model,Paul Topinard,Social Class Language GameDOI
10.4324/9781003167037ISBN
9781003167037, 9780367460679, 9780367764678Publisher
Taylor & FrancisPublisher website
https://taylorandfrancis.com/Publication date and place
2021Imprint
RoutledgeSeries
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature,Classification
Literature: history and criticism
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Philosophical traditions and schools of thought
Western philosophy from c 1800
Colonialism and imperialism
Social discrimination and social justice
Indigenous peoples
Relating to Indigenous peoples