Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Antenor Firmin's Letters from St. Thomas

This essay examines the question of black internationalism in the last work written by Anténor Firmin, The Letters from St. Thomas. These letters, written in exile on the island of St. Thomas, reveal Firmin's thoughts on the question of racial difference, national identity and Haiti's hemispheric role. Because of the tendency to see nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals as alienated and unenlightened, the complexity of Firmin's thought, generally dismissed as universalist and cosmopolitan, has been overlooked. In calling into question fetishistic and exclusivist notions of race and territory that were very popular at the time, Firmin makes the case for crosscultural negotiations and post-territorial theorizing that anticipate the ideas of later Caribbean thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon.