For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good
A Biography of Jean Price-Mars
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vanderbilt University Press
Publishing:15th Dec '26
£32.00
This title is due to be published on 15th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£98.00(9780826500618)
Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969) was a doctor, teacher, diplomat, and one of Haiti’s most visionary intellectuals. This biography offers the first comprehensive look at his writings, revealing a thinker dedicated to the transformation of Haiti, the advancement of his people, and the broader Black Diaspora.
From his rigorous education and intellectual formation to his engagement with social, political, and cultural issues, Price-Mars championed women’s empowerment, gender equality, and transformative leadership. He reinterpreted the Haitian Revolution and Dessalines’ legacy while articulating Pan-Africanist ideals that connected Haiti to the wider Black world.
A modernist scholar and pluralist, Price-Mars affirmed the validity of all religions while remaining independent of any single tradition. His humanistic spirituality and radical epistemology reimagined race, culture, and nation-building, offering a new vision for Haiti and the possibilities of Black achievement across the Americas.
This book presents a full portrait of Price-Mars as a thinker, reformer, and moral visionary, and a man whose lifelong mission was nothing less than the birth of a new people and the pursuit of the common good.
“Celucien L. Joseph provides an impressive analysis of Jean Price-Mars’s ideas and writings by engaging critically with their contributions to debates on race, religion, Vodou, feminism, and Pan-Africanism. In the process, he reveals the rich and nuanced and yet neglected scholarship of one of Haiti’s most important intellectual figures.”
—Robert Fatton Jr., author of The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States
“Among the most prolific Haitian studies scholars of our generation, Celucien Joseph has done it again with For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good. In this gripping biography, Joseph brilliantly restores Jean Price-Mars to his rightful place as one of the African diaspora’s most dynamic intellectuals, bridging the Haitian Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, and global Black thought. Methodologically rich and impeccably researched, Joseph’s work masterfully illuminates Price-Mars’s multifaceted legacy—from his groundbreaking ethnographic defense of Vodou to his feminist sensibilities, anti-imperialist leadership, and enduring vision of humanistic solidarity. Joseph writes with analytical rigor, historical clarity, and a profound reverence for the Diasporic Black intellectual tradition.”
—Leslie M. Alexander, author of Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States
“A powerful biography of one of Haiti’s most important twentieth-century intellectuals. Joseph gives readers a monument to Jean Price-Mars that does justice to his complexity as a thinker and humanist, and to his place in Black diasporic thought.”
—Chelsea Stieber, author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954
“This is a monumental and much-needed intellectual biography that will stand as a major contribution to Haitian studies and Black Atlantic thought.”
—Linsey Sainte-Claire, assistant professor of Francophone studies at Rice University
ISBN: 9780826500601
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
406 pages