Louis joseph janvier biography of williams

He was born in Port-au-Prince in to a prosperous Protestant family and at the age of twenty-two left his beloved homeland to complete his medical studies in France. The cultural and intellectual life of France during the early years of the Third Republic nurtured the young Janvier and he published a number of articles in the leading avant-garde journals of the day.

As he matured, Janvier, along with other expatriate Haitian scholars of his generation, began to challenge the racist and colonial order which constituted the metropolitan milieu of the Third Republic. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs.

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This article about a Haitian journalist is a stub. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. According to Bowlerthese writers should admit that it is they who do not like Black people. Thus, admit it, Mr. Quesnel, that you do not like Blacks! Above all, admit it that, were it not for the generous hearts in France who know how to place themselves above petty matters of skin-colour prejudice, and if all of your compatriots had as little affection for us as you do, that we would be right not to like them!

Bowler: My translation. Belief in the innate inequality of human beings and the innate inferiority of Black people constituted a field of political, literary, and scientific debate in which various authors faced off against each other throughout the 19 th Century. The refutation of the prejudiced argument of these authors set the groundwork for the idea of the unity of the human species and to claims of racial equality, as well as to challenge the idea of racial inferiority.

Janvier states that:.

Louis joseph janvier biography of williams

The programme of young Haiti, cognizant of the importance of the dignity of a nation of the Black race, is: to speak for a race entirely, to present its aspirations, proclaim its ideas, doctrines, reclaim its moral hegemony until such time as it can act for itself 12 Our emphasis. Janvier criticizes E. Renan for failing in his engagement with one of the towering intellectual figures of his time, and for dissimulating prejudice against Black people Chemla, Louis-Joseph Janvier laments the fact the contact between white Europeans and Africans occurred only in a logic of exploitation.

It is this exploitation that explains so many depreciative opinions that relegate Black peoples to the nonhuman level. After the abolition of slavery in Haiti and after abolition and emancipation in the USA, the progress obtained by Blacks in the field of politics, journalism, and science, Janvier stresses, are evident proof of the perfectibility of the Black race.

The Black race has shown the philosophical speculation is familiar to it, and the study of mathematics is not above its understanding. In the same way, the Republic of Haiti is very well represented in the scientific colleges of Paris Janvier, 26 My tranlsation. As initially stressed, the idea of the equality among human race is the basis of both the Haitian nation and Haitian social thought.

Equality is also feverously upheld by the first Haitian thinkers. First, Janvier admonishes Renan for a completely gratuitous claim and for failing in his own commitments as a homme de culture [man of lettres] Chemla, Thus, for Renan, the enslavement of Black people was an attempt to save them from their inhuman state Janvier, Louis-Joseph Janvier is part of a set of intellectuals whose mission was to deconstruct ideas of racial inequality and to prove that intelligence does not depend on race.

Paul Broca claimed that he could distinguish, at first site, a Haitian from other Blacks by the size of their cranium and their wide and vaulted forehead, by their frank stare, etc. According to Firmin, intelligence and intellectuality do not depend on the size of the individual: whether he is small or big he can display great intellectual aptitude Firmin, The rehabilitation of the Black race, as proposed by Firmin, cannot occur on the basis of scientific arguments anchored on racism and prejudice.

Other critiques of Louis-Joseph Janvier relate to his attitude toward the cultural legacy of Africans, particularly the Vodou religion 14 which, soon after the Revolution, became the object of state-sanctioned repression and prohibition. It was seen to be symbol of backwardness, incivility, and, therefore, its continuing existence had a negative impact on the image of the young Haitian nation.

In attempting to present Haiti as a civilized country in the manner of Europe, Louis-Joseph Janvier argued that Vodou had all but disappeared and that all Haitians were Christians and spoke French. For Janvier:. Catholicism, having enslaved the Blacks, continues to be an accomplice: it is responsible for the abjection in which the Black race has been stagnated for centuries; it helped to develop the prejudice of whites against Blacks; centralized in Rome, it can never become a religion of national politics; in brief, at some point, it may challenge the success of Independence.

For pure patriotism, and not for any sort of proselytism, everyone should repeat that the Protestant religion can become a powerful factor in the social development of Haiti because it is superior from the point of view of economic results and it can be national; we must repeat that all solutions are better than the current one: a concordatory Catholicism without a Haitian clergy Janvier, My translation.

Recall that Louis-Joseph Janvier was not only from a Protestant family, he was also a strict Protestant convinced that Protestantism should be the religion of the country. However, he wrongly assumed that the religion he adored could not also be used for maintaining colour prejudice. His favourable consideration of Christianism as a civilizational religion would feature in the work of racist Protestants, such as Spencer Saint-John who, in an publication, attacked the Vodou religion and Haitian culture.

Spencer Saint-John describes the Vodou religion as an orgiastic and demonical manifestation which should be violently and rigorously combated Saint-John, In this sense, it is clear that Louis-Joseph Janvier did not help to clarify religious issues in Haiti. A further criticism of Janvier is that he had considered colour prejudice to be incompatible with civilization.

It should be noted that a negligence of this type of prejudice is intimately linked to his conception of what it means to be Haitian. For this reason, he says, it was made no sense to take racial division seriously. And, according to Janvier, racial prejudice was decreasing in Haiti because the Haitian people were joining western civilization Janvier, There is no way that a civilization based on racial, cultural, etc, differences, one that treats others as nonhuman, can cease to be prejudiced in the blink of an eye.

Although Janvier wanted the intellectual and moral progress of society to put an end to colour prejudice in Haitian society, this colonial-slaveholding secular invention remains - which would contribute to the multidimensional crises faced by Haiti until this day. This article considered some aspects of the louis joseph janvier biography of williams of Louis-Joseph Janvier on anthropological ideas related to the racial question in the 19 th Century.

These considerations have not sought to be exhaustive, nor could they be. Many of the questions that his writings and his professional biography might raise were not dealt with here. We have seen that, upon completing the medicine course in Paris, the author went on to do a number of other courses. He did not work as a doctor during his stay in France, the country in which he spent most of his time.

He chose to pursue further studies, proving, through his own experience, that no scientific discipline was beyond the reach of Blacks Firmin, Alongside the louis joseph janvier biography of williams he took, Janvier was involved in political and intellectual militancy, publishing in newspapers and magazines, leaving behind a vast output that can be of interest to various fields of research - literature, anthropology, history, sociology, political science, etc.

Phtisie pulmonaire is the first important work he published in the field of medicine in Chemla, For him, science in Haiti is European. It is the ideas of the Paris school that have prevailed in Haitian jurisprudence, medicine, and natural and philosophical sciences Janvier, b: It is these principles that Haitian intellectuals sought to resignify as values shared by all human beings on the face of the earth.

This is important, lest we leave aside the complex relational dynamics that existed in these thoughts, since the production and circulation of knowledge in formerly colonized countries - were people were victims to enslavement - follow a plural path that constantly appeals to the colonial West. His anthropology was thus strictly tied to a defence of the Black race which necessarily passes through a defence of the Republic of Haiti.

Haiti which, since the revolution was not only managing and suffering imperialist and colonialist policies, but also suffered the paths followed by their governors, a fact which left Janvier perplexed. Two considerations here become relevant: i for anyone interested in understanding the basis of the idea of race and its social impacts; ii for anyone who wishes to understand the basis of the political, economic, social and cultural problems of the Haitian nation, Louis-Joseph Janvier has become an unavoidable thinker, since he is a pioneer of anti-racism and his writings remain timeless and instigating.

In sum, in a context of heated anthropological and sociological debates which seek to rethink the production of knowledge and relations of power that cut across both the production and dissemination of this knowledge, a return to these intellectuals can be an important way of adding density to these processes. In the final instance, these thinkers help us to investigate ways of overcoming the colonial or neo-colonial dimension that persists in the human sciences.

Abstract Resumo English Resumo Portuguese.