Joseph-Anténor Firmin

Certainly, the most important champion of Haiti’s modernist internationalism in the nineteenth century is the Haitian essayist Antenor Firmin. No other intellectual seemed so able to follow through on the revolutionary universalism of Haiti’s war of independence.

J. Michael Dash, The Disappearing Island: Haiti, History, and the Hemisphere (April 2004).

We can now draw a line from Anténor Firmin to Jean Price-Mars; from Jean Price-Mars to Melville Herskovits; from Melville Herskovits to Franz Boas; and thus from Anténor Firmin to the mainstream of American anthropology.

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, “Anténor Firmin and Haiti’s contribution to anthropology,” Gradhiva: Revue d’anthropologie et d’historie des arts (2005).