Ambassadors at Dawn: Haitian thinkers in the French colonial context of the 19th and 20th centuries: The example of Jean Price-Mars (1876--1969)

Situated in the fields of French colonial history and the history of ideas, this dissertation argues that much of what had happened and was happening in Haiti in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries served as an exemplar and experimental ground in later postcolonial nation-building - especially in regards to national (Francophone Africa) or regional (French Antilles) identity construction. In particular, it challenges traditional historiography by suggesting that Haiti's exceptionalism, i.e., its radical revolution and its early decolonization, is outweighed by the commonalities of the problems that arise from (French) colonialism, its aftermath and continuation. Placing France and postcolonial Haiti in the same analytic field, this study focuses on a small but intellectually prolific French-speaking elite closely tied to France from which a number of important Haitian humanist thinkers arose. The latter, through their writings published in France, challenged both the allegedly scientific, and the ideological grounds on which colonial racism and practice were based. Much of this Haitian production, which has remained outside the Western intellectual mainstream, is (proto) anthropological or anthropologically relevant, heralding some of the major concerns and concepts of the modern discipline such as debunking the biological determinist assumptions about race and redressing ethnocentrism. Anthropology, historically Eurocentric and masculinist, was reappropriated and utilized early on by Haitian intellectuals to analyze their predicament concerning the dilemmas and restrictions of postcolonial sovereignty within a global colonial order.; In recapturing this local anthropological production - and social thought, more generally - and situating it in the French colonial context (late 19 th to mid twentieth century), I demonstrate how major figures in Haitian social thought were confronted with and reflected upon key postcolonial issues inherited from French colonialism. These include cultural depossession and alienation, the critical deconstruction of the colonial Other and, above all, the capital issue of decolonizing knowledge. This study is conducted largely through the example of Jean Price-Mars, founder of Haitian ethnology, physician, diplomat, statesman and Haiti's major intellectual figure of the 20 th century.