Firmin is the organising figure of this collection, which sets his work against both the Western intellectual tradition that dismissed it and the Black Atlantic tradition it helped to found.

One group of chapters recovers his part in early Pan-Africanism, including the years of correspondence and planning with his compatriot Benito Sylvain and the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams that produced the London conference of 1900, and measures his insistence on the equality of the races against the self-determination politics later associated with Du Bois, Garvey and Malcolm X. Another follows the argument about the African origins of ancient Egypt from Firmin to Cheikh Anta Diop, asking why it is Diop rather than Firmin whose name Afrocentrism remembers.

A closing section reads Firmin philosophically. Comtean positivism let him dismantle scientific racism by appeal to universal law, yet its unilineal model of history was itself hostile to difference, a tension the contributors examine rather than resolve.