A revista Sankofa tem como objetivo abrir espaço para publicação de textos inéditos nas áreas de História da África, Diáspora, Cultura Política e Colonialidade.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
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Enslaved to the Temple: the Search for Freedom in Masonic Lodges
The production of studies on urban slavery in recent decades has consolidated the leading role of enslaved people in the struggle for freedom. This article aims to analyze some strategies adopted by enslaved people in the city of São Paulo with the goal of achieving freedom. Newspapers and Masonic records documented some of the strategies adopted by enslaved people to raise funds or obtain effective freedom, making use of some rites specific to the Masonic organization. Many captives saw Masonic temples as a space of support. In the América and Piratininga lodges, a significant portion of abolitionists active in the city of São Paulo were gathered. At the head of the América lodge was Luiz Gama, a renowned abolitionist of the place, who was frequently sought out by enslaved people. Documents from the lodge reveal Mason’s initiative in supporting enslaved people who sought the temple.
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Interesse em Yemanjá branca e negra no Brasil: uma análise temporal com Google Trends
Este projeto de pesquisa investiga as tendências temporais do interesse público em Yemanjá branca e negra no Brasil, utilizando dados do Google Trends. A pesquisa busca identificar padrões sazonais, tendências e correlações entre o interesse nessas representações da divindade com eventos culturais, festividades religiosas e notícias relevantes, explorando como o embranquecimento de Yemanjá reflete as relações de poder e as desigualdades raciais na sociedade brasileira. Serão utilizadas técnicas de análise de dados univariada e bivariada, análise exploratória de dados e Análise de Variância (ANOVA) para comparar o interesse nas diferentes representações da divindade. A implementação da análise será realizada em Python, com bibliotecas como Pandas e Pytrends. Os resultados serão visualizados em gráficos interativos e informativos, permitindo uma análise abrangente da dinâmica do interesse público em Yemanjá Branca e Negra ao longo do tempo. Espera-se que a pesquisa contribua para uma compreensão mais profunda do papel de Yemanjá na cultura brasileira contemporânea e do processo de embranquecimento de divindades africanas no Brasil, com implicações em áreas como marketing, turismo cultural e estudos sociais.
Fetishization of Guilt and Simulacrum of Alliance: a Critique of Institutional Whiteness
This article critically examines racial alliances between white individuals and Black movements in Brazil, showing how whiteness retains power even when positioned as an “ally.” Drawing from “escrevivência” and thinkers like Lélia Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro, and bell hooks, it denounces the racial pact that politically empties listening, aestheticizes white guilt, and uses praise as a tool of control. Symbolic representation offered by institutions fails to dismantle structural racism due to the lack of actual power redistribution. The article rejects conciliatory approaches, instead proposing a radical restructuring policy based on restitution and Black authority. True alliance demands the renunciation of white centrality and privilege. Inspired by hooks’ concept of radical love, this work positions itself as an act of confrontation rather than appeasement.
The Terreiro and the city: Voices on African ecological and cultural heritage in Bahia (1960–1980)
This article analyzes the urban modernization of Salvador between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. It examines the impacts of these transformations on terreiro communities as well as analyzing the ways in which religious people acted in the face of threats to Afro-Brazilian ecological and cultural heritage. It investigates the circulation of symbols, worldviews, and dictions from the terreiros in the public sphere of the Bahian capital (Van de Port, 2012; Parés, 2012) through the press and from a historical-anthropological perspective. In the analyzed period, there were decisive moments in the history of Afro-Bahian religiosity, such as the end of registrations and licenses at the public security agencies of the State of Bahia. Additionally, in this context, new state policies and new approaches to Afro-Brazilian religiosity could be found in Bahian newspapers. By consulting press references, it was possible to recover evidence of the main lines of the municipal administration intervention under the military regime in the city and new behaviors by the public linked to the terreiros because of the implementation of urban reforms. Results show that this period of change in the landscape of the capital of Bahia coincided with the historical and political emergence of Black voices in defense of an African ecological and cultural heritage and religious freedom and against racial and class inequality.
Songs, Renaissance and Mourning: an ethnography of the ritualistic knowledge of Altair Bento de Oliveira in the Ketu nation's Candomblé
This Article, part of my master's thesis, aims to present an ethnography about the contribution of Bàbálòrìṣà Altair Bento de Oliveira to the Ketu nation's Candomblé, in understanding the main rituals performed in the terreiros. Known among the Bàbálòrìṣà and Iyálòrìṣà as a “Visionary” for having opened the door to the secret of the cult held in the houses, his contributions are described in his three literary works: the first called “Singing for the Òrìṣà” (Pallas), describes the translation of the songs used in the festivities; the second, entitled Ẹlẹ́gùn (Pallas), explains the main rituals that are performed within the initiation rite and the third book “Àṣèṣé: the restart of life” (published independently), describes the funeral ritual for the initiated adepts. Thus, even under criticism from the most conservative priests, these publications became a masterpiece for scholars and followers within the Afro-Brazilian religious universe.
Willians Antonio Alves Teixeira Damasceno
Ao fazer esse exercício com relação à Tradição oral histórica, a coerência interna é inquebrável, com pouca porosidade; as metalinguagens traduzem a multissemântica que codifica os diferentes ângulos da ocorrência. Acontece que os conservadores dessas narrativas percebem parcialmente o conteúdo. Isto leva a que uma mesma Tradição seja interpretada de forma diferente e complementar no nzo ndêmbo, ñkîsi lêmba, kimpasi, Bankîmba etc. À medida que a pessoa é iniciada em diferentes escolas, mais robusta será a sua compreensão da narração. Pessoas assim não eram vulgares e os etnógrafos tiveram sérias dificuldades em alcançá-las, tal como se pode notar no caso de Marcel Griaule.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sankofa (São Paulo) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Exu's silence in black(s) diasporic(s) culture(s): a story of resistance of its language
The present study is based on the epistemologies of the crossroads, domain of Exu [Eshu or Èṣù], lord of languages, cosmological principle and communication principle according to Yoruba traditions both in Africa and in its diaspora. Its central objective is to reflect on Exu’s silence as a language of resistance and as a means of its multiplication in black diasporic cultures. It is from such epistemologies that Exu is conceived as a cosmological principle and animator of the existence of beings and the cosmos. Yoruba traditions are constituted by such epistemologies. It was the Yoruba who brought them to these other shores of the South Atlantic, where Exu multiplied, constituting other modes and meanings. This is the reason why there was an interest in reflecting on the dispersion of this deity in the lands located on the other shores of the South Atlantic. In synthesis, this is a decolonial study that seeks to listen to the silence imposed on people subjugated by European colonialism.
This article aims to analyze relations between Brazil and Angola during the first Workers' Party governments in Brazil. It deals with the strengthening of relationships within and beyond this period, paying attention to the horizon of expectations and the projects supported, seeking to reveal the level of deepening of these and the developments of both for the two countries, with emphasis on understanding the role of Brazil and as characteristics of such a partnership.
Between Forced and Free Labor: negotiation and conflict of caravan workers in Angola – mid-19th century
In the mid-19th century, with the expansion of the abolitionism in the Atlantic World and with the subsequent reconversion of the Angolan Colonial Economy from a slave supplier to the Transatlantic trade to an exporter of agricultural and extractive goods, the demand for human porters for the long-distance trade caravans increased considerably. The porter’s recruitment was always an object of concern for the colonial authorities and was fundamental to the existence of the huge flux of commodities between the Atlantic and Angola’s hinterland and constantly resulted in rebellions and conflicts in the areas with more political interference from the Portuguese settlers. When they appeared in the core of the abolitionist debate, the recruitment and maintenance conditions in the caravans changed intensely, while the colonial economy mostly needed its services. Considering those processes, this paper will debate about the multiples impacts of the Portuguese colonial abolitionism over the caravan labor in Angola, recognizing autonomous dynamics inside the African trade and heterogeneous reactions from the various social agents.
Malês, Cabanos and Marimbondos: histories of black resistance in Alagoas (1815-1852)
This text investigates how enslaved people resisted and sought, in different ways, to combat the institution of slavery in Alagoas in the first half of the 19th century. To this end, it takes as its guiding axis the life experiences of these historical subjects, emphasizing the dissonant voices of the enslaved, but also paying attention to the networks of solidarity and sociability established with freed and poor free people. In this way, we seek to study episodes of resistance to slavery carried out by this population that reinvented itself and developed, within the existing possibilities, various strategies to obtain their means of subsistence and oppose the slave institution, always having freedom on their horizon. The episodes of black resistance studied here are: the slave revolt of 1815, the Cabanos War (1832-1835) and the fight against the “Captivity Law” (1851-1852).
Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the historian-philosopher
The article presents an analysis of the intellectual trajectory of the renowned historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, born in Burkina-Faso. I seek to highlight his self-construction as a “historian- philosopher” (Lucien Goldmann, 1979). In other words, a researcher focused on a dialectical compression of history, in which he seeks to reveal the conceptual essence present on the empirical phenomena analyzed. Especially when Ki-Zerbo intended to give concreteness to what he called the “African perspective” for the study of Africa; a theory that became a practice for the author, considering his intellectual and life trajectory.
The transnationalism of Black Lives Matter and the interpretations of contemporary racisms
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the Black Lives Matter wave of protests, which has become a transnational phenomenon, has generated public debates about systematic and structural racisms. Racial hierarchies, which were structured from slavery and colonialism, were founded on segregationist practices and discourses about the innate inferiority of non-European populations. The experience of the Holocaust, however, collapsed the pattern of these hierarchies that were consolidated in the 19th century. The creation of the UN System in the post-war period spurred the development of a regime to combat racial discrimination and the formalization of equal rights in democratic regimes. Racism, however, has undergone transformations and created new repertoires. Black Lives Matters in the United States, by denouncing police violence, spread interpretations about the distinct mechanisms of contemporary racisms among a wider public and triggered globally protests of articulations and movements that built and interconnected transnationally antiracist imaginaries.
Ações museais e o Pós-Abolição: notas sobre a exposição “Ante ecos e ocos” no Museu Paranaense
This paper aims to think about the possibilities of narrative construction about Afro- paranaenses people in museum institutions, especially at Museu Paranaense, based on museology and historiography references, with emphasis on texts related to New Museology and post emancipation historiography. The analysis stars about museum actions formed by the Museu Paranaense, in particular the exhibition “Ante ecos e ocos”, conceived in 2022 from the shared curatorship process. If, on the one hand, the institution's ability to address issues related to the trajectory of Afro-paranaenses people is evaluated, on the other hand, it presents a range of theoretical and practical actions that make, or should make, a more solid link between the museum institution and society, in the search for making the public institution not only more active with the community to which it belongs, but open to cultural desacralization.
Copyright (c) 2023 Sankofa (São Paulo) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Solidariedade atlântica: Movimento Afro-Brasileiro Pró-Libertação de Angola (MABLA), entre percursos e conexões
This text aims to show how the Brazilian movement in support of African independence, created in the 1960s, was able to shape a network of solidarity with the African nationalist movements, especially the MPLA, and give greater visibility to the struggle for independence in the Portuguese colonies, mainly in Angola. The Movimento Afro-Brasileiro Pró-Libertação de Angola (MABLA) brought together Brazilians, Africans and Portuguese anti-Salazarists and worked mainly in the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. MABLA was a movement of mobile configuration that brought together supporters of diverse ideological tendencies around a common project: the defense of the independence of the African peoples.
Amina of Zazzau was an important Hausa political and military leader between the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. This article has as one of its objectives to serve as a subsidy and support instrument for the debate on the film Amina (2021), whether for the reading by History and Humanities students in a university context, or secondary school teachers using the film as a teaching tool. Therefore, this article is divided into three parts. Firstly, we will discuss the audiovisual production Amina (2021) in the regional and national context of the Nigerian film industry (Nollywood and Kannywood), as well as the demand coming from a cosmopolitan niche of audiovisual consumption in the international streaming market for African films; second, we will contextualize the History of Amina, the historical sources on the character and political and cultural context of the Hausa country, notably the kingdom of Zazzau between the 15th and 16th centuries; finally, we will critically discuss the film at its narrative and production levels, thinking about its didactic potential.
Exu and the History of Present Time: a possible crossroads?
This text aims to establish a dialogue between Exu, the messenger orixá of Afro- Brazilian religions, and the History of Present Time, a new methodological historiography attitude from the middle of the second half of the twentieth century, from France. For this purpose, is made use of relevant bibliography produced by religious-yard intellectuals, such as Luiz Rufino, Pai Rodnei de Oxóssi, Muniz Sodré and Ronilda Iyakemi Ribeiro, in dialogue with thinkers relevant to the debates on the Theory of History, namely Walter Benjamin, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, José D'Assunção Barros and Reinhart Koselleck. The text is divided into three parts. In the first of them, the theoretical and methodological possibilities of Exuneutics for the historiographical operation are discussed, aiming to transform the Christian cross - under which the historical discipline was erected - into the crossroads of Exu. In the sequel, Walter Benjamin and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie encounter Exu and the struggles against the dangers of a single history gain a powerful ally. In the third and last part, I conclude the text with general reflections on the various discussions presented.
Africa and Its Representation: Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance in the literature of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
During a long time, whenever Africa was talked about, it was described as a continent in which misery prevailed and that was doomed to failure. This belief is the result of a single promoted history from, especially, the West that has stereotyped the African continent. Literature, which stablishes dialogues with historical movements and represents societies, has contributed to deconstruct this single narrative, especially with the relevance, which is only increasing, that African authors and narratives have reached. In that sense, the following paper analyzes the interaction between Pan-African and African Renaissance movements in the works Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, respectively. To accomplish that, it is used an inductive procedure and a review of literature that presents theoretical assumptions of these two movements developed in different periods: the Pan-Africanism in the 19th and 20th centuries and the African Renaissance starting in the last decade of the 20th century and going until contemporaneity. In the development of this paper, it was noted that the works of Adichie present nuances of both aforesaid movements and that the author deconstructs the stereotype of a single history of Africa by representing the complexity of conditions faced by the population.
Interview by Revista SANKOFA with Ahmed Mulay Ali Hamadi, representative of the Polisario Front in Brazil, October 5, 2022
Through Igor Grabois, Revista SANKOFA had the opportunity to interview the Polisario Front representative Ahmed Mulay Ali Hamadi, taking advantage of his visit to Brazil. The questions were prepared by Apoena Canuto Cosenza, and the interview was held on October 5th. The Polisario Front is a political organization founded on May 10, 1973. It fights for the liberation of Western Sahara and for international recognition of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic. Currently, Western Sahara is occupied by Moroccan troops, and its territory is divided into two: a free zone, where the government of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic organizes the life of its people, and a zone occupied by Morocco, where the population still fight for their freedom. In this interview, we seek to understand the meaning of this liberation struggle and its relevance for Africa and Latin America.
Memórias e narrativas negras na cidade de Laguna/Sul do Brasil: Possibilidade de construção de conhecimento no campo da história do tempo presente desde uma perspectiva decolonial
The purpose of this article is to reflect theoretical and methodological possibilities for the construction of knowledge in the field of the history of the Present Time from a decolonial perspective. For this, I seek in dialogue with productions located in the fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies, as well as Afro-Brazilian and Diaspora studies the analytical and conceptual tools that enable me to think and develop a methodological work in the field of historiography Pretos to observe the constitution of a black territory in the city and in the present time. The main sources for the historiographical work that I bring excerpt of interviews conducted during the year 2021 with people from the city. Next to the oral sources I sought to trigger archival sources, excerpts from periodicals and texts of memorialists dating from the twentieth century.History of the Present Time. To address these issues I seek in the analysis of memories and narratives about the chapel and Brotherhood of N. S. do Rosário dos Homens
Decolonization Process in the PALOP: Analysis of the Internal and External Constraints of the Liberation Struggle in Guinea-Bissau
Considering the need to analyze and understand colonialism and the processes of decolonization in African Countries of the Portuguese Official Language (PALOP), mainly in Guinea-Bissau, we sought to identify the internal and external constraints that led to the emergence of independent movements and their strategies of mobilization to blacks, at the international and local level, in view of the situation experienced at the time. It is also known that colonialism lasted less than a century. However, the invasion, oppression and dehumanization developed by Western explorers to the African people lasted five centuries, that is, from the 15th to the 20th century. In this historical context, the work is developed through the qualitative methodological approach, applying the bibliographic procedure. The high level of colonial exploitation inflicted on African blacks, the structural problems that plague the negroes of the diaspora due to their slave past and the cyclical devaluation of endogenous cultural systems, have sprouted in the diaspora and the African continent itself, movements that denounced the colonial exploitation and underestimation of the negro at the world level. However, the colonial system Portuguese and the others did not want to leave the occupied territories on the continent, due to revenue stemming from the plundering of natural resources and the exploitation of the African workforce.
De Colonos laboriosos, gatunos e bêbados trapaceiros: Mundos do trabalho e colonialismo em At Home in the Transvaal (1884), de Mary Ann Carey-Hobson
The article analyzes Mary Ann Carey-Hobson’s adventure novel At Home in the Transvaal (1884), observing the literary source from a theoretical-methodological perspective that emphasizes its relations with labor and colonialism in southern Africa, during the 1870s and 1880s. The analysis emphasizes the idealization of farmers and workers in the mining fields, noting Hobson's emphasis on a desirable type of settler: young, hardworking and enterprising, subservient and affectionately attached to their employers, symptomatic of racialist and paternalistic elements in Hobson's literary writing. In this way, the novel approaches the interests of the colonial elite and the white settlers in southern Africa, which, in that context, aimed to establish more effective ways of controlling black Africans’ labor and lands.without “moral vices”, such as alcoholism or gambling. Furthermore, Hobson draws distinctions between white and black workers, describing them as domestic servants,
Past-Present-Past in the Making of Future: What Can We Learn from Black is King?
As a result of a monograph, this work focuses on the afrocentric and afroreferential elements present in the work The Gift/Black is King, by the multi-artist Beyoncé. In the seam between Afrocentrism and Anthropology, the latter in its artistic-musical dimensions, along with the circumscription of content analysis methods, we understand art, especially music, as the tensioning and potentially propositional locus of the black humanities, so that the rescue of elements in the African ancestry, in ways of weaving the present and the future in Afrofuturist narratives, culminate in other alternatives for black people that end with the racist status quo, universalizing and, therefore, Eurocentric. Thus, we discuss Sankofa and the Afrofuturism movement in line with elements present in Beyoncé's songs that resignify them in the present by weaving narratives for black human fulfillment, resulting in self-esteem and afroreference in African subjects in diaspora or not, allowing other meanings about the world that move away from definitions of being and being based on the Western colonial being.
“Uma paisagem por baixo da outra”: narrativas de coloniais sobre a natureza na trilogia “as areias do imperador” de mia couto
This paper analyzes the literary text of the trilogy “Sands of the Emperor” by the Mozambican writer and biologist Mia Couto. In the book, Mia Couto narrates the colonial war waged by Portugal in southern Mozambique in 1895, aiming at capturing Emperor Ngungunhane and dissolving the Gaza Kingdom, considered the last political resistance to Portuguese colonial power. Based on references that relate to the network of traditional knowledge and the orality of Mozambican cultures, Mia Couto builds a reinterpretation of the Mozambican colonial past, pointing out the marks left by colonization and mainly, showing the resistance processes of local cultures. The resistances were formed through the mobilization of several factors present in the history and cultures of the societies that were targeted by the colonial projects and that are related to their ways of existing and seeing the world. In this article, the aspects related to the environment that participated in the engendering of these resistances will be highlighted. These aspects, in turn, are not isolated and act in a sphere of intertwining between history and traditional knowledge. Finally, it is emphasized that thinking about environmental aspects as an active element in the history of these societies and in the history of resistance to the colonial process makes it possible to dialogue with particular notions of environmental heritage. In this way, based on the historical analysis and the literary text, we discuss the landscape narratives present in the books that compose Mia Couto's trilogy and their contributions to think about environmental heritage from the perspectives made invisible by the colonial Eurocentric narrative.
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“Neo zumbilismo é agora”: 20 de novembro e consciência negra no Brasil
November 20th (Zumbi and Black Consciousness National Day) is the black population symbolic date in Brazil, claimed by black organizations as a contrast to May 13th Abolition of Slavery’s traditional celebrations (since 1888). This paper aims to disscuss the Black Consciousness concept, considering the reflections of Biko (1990), Fanon (2008), Mbembe (2014), Souza (1983), Nascimento (2018) and Gonzales (1982). Based on these authors categories, will be analyzed sources such as Unified Black Movement (MNU)’s inaugural documents, manifestos and videos of the Marches for Zumbi at late 20th century. Thus, the article discusses the process that materializes in 10.639/2003 and 12.519/11 laws, recognizing November 20 as a national ephemeris.
LITERATURE, IMAGE AND RESISTANCE: THINGS FALL APART AND THE RESCUE OF ANCESTRAL MEMORIES
This paper aims to investigate literature’s role in the representation of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer from Chinua Achebe’s novel Things fall apart (2009); besides to study how this relationship changes the colonized society and its traditions. In order to do that, this work focused on the works of Bonnici (2005), Fanon (2008/1952), Santos (2008), Kilomba (2019) and Césaire (2020/1950); besides Achebe’s African Trilogy, as well as his critical works. Hence, it was observed that Achebe's literature is caracterized as a post-colonial writing and made it possible to change the image created by the colonial literary tradition, inaugurating a new way to write about Africa, considering the colonized’s point of view. Furthermore, Achebe enabled the emergence of positive identities as well as the valorization of ancestral memories.
Educação Africana: possibilidades pedagógicas
Abordando os efeitos dos valores civilizatórios de matriz africana e suas eventuais possibilidades nos processos escolares, este artigo busca, primeiramente, desmistificar diversos significados apostos, pejorativamente, a elementos desta matriz; a seguir, se volta para a apresentação das bases culturais presentes nesta visão de mundo e o processo ensino/aprendizagem daí decorrente, de forma a possibilitar a visualização das diferenças entre a mesma e o entendimento ocidental disseminado sobre estas sociedades a partir da Europa estendida, ou seja: da expansão da cultura europeia sobre terras e populações indevidamente subjugadas. Portanto, o artigo tem o intuito de apresentar tais valores como possibilidades para o trato pedagógico, escolar e oficial ou não.
Crianças africanas escravizadas nos anúncios de fugidos, nos oitocentos, na cidade do Rio de Janeiro
This article is an excerpt from a doctoral thesis in progress and aims to propose questions and reflections, from the paradigm of Afrocentricity, African children enslaved as African subjects, that is, as historical subjects and social actors who were made invisible in demographics. From the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil to include them in the historiography of Brazilian childhood. In this work, the analysis is made through 420 advertisements of escapes of enslaved African children published between the years 1839 to 1849 in the newspaper O Diário do Rio de Janeiro. It is important to relate these enslaved African children (found in the runaway ads in the newspaper) and the African childhood lived and relived by many of them in their memories brought in body and mind, seen daily among their own, in the city, in the 19th century
Enslaved africans in the cocoa expansion of Ilhéus-Bahia, 1850-1888
This article analyzes the enslaved Africans in Ilhéus, southern Bahia, between the years 1850 and 1888, the period of expansion of the cocoa crop. It focuses on the economic activities engaged and the demographic characteristics of the population. The privileged sources are postmortem inventories and the 1872 General Census of the Empire of Brazil. The main view emphasizes the situations of vulnerability imposed very often, involving exploitation of labor and the many families dismantling through sales and donations, when dividing goods among heirs. In this context, ordinarily treated as commodities, they reacted in several ways.
RESENHA FIRMIN, JOSEPH-ANTÉNOR. IGUALDAD DE LAS RAZAS HUMANAS: ANTROPOLOGÍA POSITIVA. LA HABANA, EDITORIAL DE CIENCIAS SOCIALES, 2013.
A obra A Igualdade das Raças Humanas, escrita pelo haitiano Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), representa um divisor de águas nas Ciências Sociais, sobretudo na Antropologia. Publicado em 1885, o livro se apresenta como uma espécie de resposta às “ideias força” que vigoravam no campo da Antropologia do século XIX, propagadas principalmente pelas teses do escritor francês Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), por meio do livro Ensayo sobre la desigualdad de las razas humanas, publicado originalmente em Paris entre os anos de 1853 e 1855. Gobineau, tal como prevê o título do seu livro, defendia a existência das desigualdades entre as raças humanas. O livro de Firmin, ao se contrapor à essas teses, é um estudo de extrema importância para se compreender a linha argumentativa dos antropólogos que defendiam a existência das desigualdades entre as raças humanas, bem como para apreender as fragilidades de tais argumentos e como eles influenciaram na postura colonialista e imperialista dos diversos países da Europa.
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