“Revisiting Haitian Identity: Firmin, Price-Mars, and the Legacies of German Racial Thought”

The idea to be Haitian is to be Vodou/a Vodouyizan is based on 19th century German racial concept and ideology, which was linked to the concept of nation and German nationalism.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in My Father’s House and Lines of Descent, critiques this kind of thinking within Africana and African American Studies. He specifically challenges W. E. B. Du Bois’ notions of cultural and racial identity (see Lines of Descent). In “The Equality of the Human Races” (1885), Haitian anthropologist Joseph Anténor Firmin also engaged this debate. Drawing from Ernest Renan’s classic essay “What Is a Nation?” (1882) Firmin argued against racialist discourse that grounded nationalism, culture, and identity in supposed common racial or historical origins.

Interestingly, like Dubois, Jean Price-Mars would advance a similar theory in respect to Haitian nationalism and cultural identity, which he linked to religion—especially the Vodou religion. The enormous impact of Price-Mars on Haitian Vodou scholars and thinkers would undermine their logic on the relationship between nationalism, religion, and culture. However, this trajectory largely eclipsed Firmin’s approach. In other words, contemporary Haitian anthropologists, Vodou scholars, and thinkers did not follow Firmin when discussing these topics; rather, they followed the footsteps of Price-Mars. Today, I’ve seen many brilliant Haitian scholars continue to converge nationalism, culture, and identity, frequently without scrutinizing the German racial-ideological roots of this conceptual framework.