480 p., By the end of 1825, 6,000 African Americans had left the United States to settle in the free black Republic of Haiti. After arriving on the island, 200 immigrants formed an enclave in what is now Samaná, Dominican Republic. The Americans in Samaná continued to speak English, remained Protestant (in a country of devout Catholics), and retained American cultural practices for over 150 years. Relying on historical archaeological methods, this dissertation explores the processes of community formation, maintenance, and dissolution, while paying particular attention to intersections of race and nation.
Antenor Firmin (1850-1911) is probably the first scholar of African descent to
write a systematic work of anthropology, one that anticipated the eventual scope and breadth of the new science well beyond the narrow, racialist physical anthropology that it critiqued.
On Saturday, February 24, at Artisan's World Art Gallery in Cambridge, Professor Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban of the University of Rhode Island, presented on Haitian anthropologist Anténor [Firmin]'s book, De l'Egalité des Races Humaines (Anthropologie positive) (Paris, Librairie Cotillon, 1885), a powerful refutation of the work of prominent 19th century French anthropologist Arthur de Gobineau, who had argued the "natural" inferiority of the black race in the The Inequality of Human Race.
