“Some Updates about My Intellectual Biography on Jean Price-Mars”

I published my first academic essay on Jean Price-Mars eleven years ago, the same year I graduated with my PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas (#UTDallas). The title of the essay is “The Religious Philosophy of Jean Price-Mars.” Journal of Black Studies 43.6 (2012): 620–645. Little that I knew back then that I would be devoting the next eleven years of my life working on an intellectual biography on the man.

I was introduced to Price-Mars in a course on “The African Diaspora” while I was working on my master’s degree at the University of Louisville (KY). The brilliant African-American professor, activist, and educator Dr. J. Blaine Hudson (1949 – 2013), who also served as the Chair for the Department of Pan-African Studies and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the UofL introduced me to some of the most influential intellectual giants and activists in Black Studies and the African Diaspora, including W.E. B. Du Bois, Jean Price-Mars, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Aime Cesaire, Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Francis Kwame Nkrumah, Stokely Carmichael, Amílcar Cabral, etc. That happened 20 years ago.

Interestingly, this class with Dr. Hudson has prompted me to pursue deeper knowledge and understanding about the histories, stories, experiences, and struggles of the people of African descent in the African diaspora, with a special attention on Black America and Haiti.

When I originally applied for the admission to the PhD program at the University of Texas at Dallas, I was accepted to the doctoral program in (Intellectual) History. At first, I wanted to do European history, especially contemporary European thought/history of ideas as academic research. I spent a whole year in the PhD program in History and took courses in the discipline. After my first year, I decided to change my major to (English) Literary Studies with an emphasis in three academic areas of research: African American Intellectual History, African American Literature, and Caribbean Literature and Culture. It was through my academic interest in African American Intellectual History that I encountered Jean Price-Mars for a second time. It was another life-changing experience for me. In addition to W.E. B. Du Bois, Price-Mars suddenly became my intellectual idol and dead mentor/teacher.

According to some people, if you have a keen interest in African American Studies and want to get a good handle of its intellectual enterprise, you just have to read everything W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) has written on the Black experience in American history. In the same line of thought, it is impossible to have a good grasp of Haitian history and its intellectual side without reading and understanding Price-Mars. Jean Price-Mars is the very embodiment of Haitian intellectual thought, both present and past, and reading Price-Mars is learning about Haiti and the Haitian people in all their complexity, dimensions, and challenges. Contemporary Haitian intellectual history is a footnote to the writings and ideas of Jean Price-Mars (1876 – 1969).

The current manuscript (the intellectual biography) is 479 pages + a 20-page bibliographic reference. Today, I finalized this exceptionally long and detailed bibliography (Chicago Style). It has been quite a tedious task, to say the least. As I am writing this note to you, I am thinking whether I should add a few appendices (maybe 3) that will offer an outline of Price-Mars’ life and writings–as I have done in my book on Jacques Roumain. What do you think? Would you find the appendices on the subject matter helpful in a book that is already long?