For decades, I’ve been fighting to bring Manuel Querino, a pioneering Afro-Brazilian scholar, out of the shadows. Last week, I found a new ally in that fight: a PhD student at the prestigious University of São Paulo (USP), who has made Querino the focus of his thesis. His name is Fernando Filho, he is a sociologist, and his approach to what I call “Querinology” is to answer three questions:

• how can Querino’s theses contribute to Brazilian social thinking?
• what led to his “invisibility” in social theory?
• to what extent are the subjects Querino dealt with also addressed by renowned authors like Gilberto Freyre and Florestan Fernandes?

Speaking on Google Meet, we spent over an hour discussing our approaches to Querino. Fernando told me how he struggled to get his PhD accepted by a university – being turned down by more than one before getting accepted at USP. He also said that he has been speaking about Querino at conferences in several Latin American countries and finding that the Afro-Brazilian polymath is still a complete unknown there.

I shared some sources, including the collection of essays in Manuel Querino (1851-1923), and explained how I began researching his life and work – thanks to my MA supervisor at UCLA, the late great E. Bradford Burns. I also observed that when I first arrived in Brazil in 1986, Querino had been largely forgotten or, worse, dismissed as an unreliable source. It took years of effort and many publications to change that.

What I took away from our conversation was

(a) despite the fact that I and other scholars, including Jeferson Bacelar, Luiz Freire, Maria das Graças de Andrade Leal, and Jaime Nascimento, have been writing and lecturing about Querino for decades, he is still largely unknown in Brazil’s elite universities; and

(b) ensuring that his life and legacy are not forgotten is a generational task.

Clearly, there is still much work to be done in bringing Querino the recognition he deserves. But with passionate scholars like Fernando Filho taking up the mantle, I’m hopeful for the future of ‘Querinology.'”

A luta continua (the fight goes on).

Sabrina Gledhill