Anthropologie positive was the subtitle Antenor Firmin gave his 1885 answer to the racial science of his day, and this collection is the first book in English devoted to the Haitian diplomat who wrote it. The introduction sets out the twofold task the contributors take up: dismantling the racial assumptions built into nineteenth century anthropology and historiography, and putting something in their place, a revised account of human origins that credits precolonial Africa and a model of societies developing along several lines at once. Eleven chapters, three of them translated from French, fall into three parts. The first places Firmin within Haitian and Caribbean intellectual life, including his book on Roosevelt and his reading of Toussaint Louverture. The second connects him to Pan-Africanism, to Malcolm X and to later Afrocentric Egyptology, arguing that he preceded Diop. The third weighs his universalism against Western social theory and his politics of equality against empire.