ABSTRACT
In essays such as Arthur de Gobineau’s De l’inegalité des races humaines (1853), rhetorics of comparison have been a central element in the construction of different races and the modeling of “scientific racism.” Nevertheless, these racist ideologies did not remain uncontested, and it was especially the intellectual legacy of the Haitian Revolution that played a key role in the shaping of what has recently been named “Haitian Atlantic humanism” (M. Daut).
However, nineteenth-century Haitian diasporic intellectuals have frequently been omitted from international research tracing an intellectual history of the Atlantic sphere in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Publications by Haitian diasporic intellectuals like Louis Joseph Janvier or Joseph Anténor Firmin, both residing in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, have only recently been reconsidered as important examples of a “hemispheric crossculturality” (M. Dash) as well as for Pan-African and Pan-American thought. In publications such as De l’égalité des races humaines (1885) nineteenth-century Haitian diasporic intellectual Joseph Anténor Firmin contested racist ideologies.
