Chapter 3 Reinventing Europe
Joseph Anténor Firmin and the Legacy of the Nineteenth Century
Abstract
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
Forensic Anthropology,Haitian Revolution,De Gobineau,Black Atlantic Tradition,Toussaint Louverture,Victor Schoelcher,Haitian Intellectual,Scientific Racism,Michael Dash,Comte De Buffon,Paul Topinard,Racist Killing,Polygenistic Origin,Transnational Entanglements,Juridical Rhetoric,Atlantic Sphere,Black Public Intellectual,Mulattoes,La Forme,Jean Price Mars,Human Remains,Afrocentric Paradigm,Multiple Developmental Trajectories,Multilineal Evolution,State Of HaitiDOI
10.4324/9781003167037-5ISBN
9780367460679, 9780367764678, 9781003167037Publisher
Taylor & FrancisPublisher website
https://taylorandfrancis.com/Publication date and place
2021Imprint
RoutledgeClassification
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