US race relations

Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

Black Atlantic Crossings by Sabrina Gledhill examines the lives and anti-racist tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, two influential figures in the Black Atlantic world whose contributions have often been overlooked or belittled. Challenging this historical erasure, the book argues that these figures were not merely products of their respective national contexts (the United States and Brazil) but rather transatlantic intellectuals who navigated and challenged the racialised boundaries of their time. It emphasises the interconnectedness of Black experiences and intellectual movements across the Atlantic, highlighting how Washington and Querino, despite their geographical distance, shared common concerns and engaged in vital transnational dialogues. Furthermore, it analyses the strategies and tactics they employed to combat racism and promote social justice within their societies, including their engagement with education, politics, and cultural production, ultimately offering a crucial rethinking of their lives, work, and enduring impact beyond narrow nationalistic frameworks.

The latest addition to Funmilayo’s Unsung Heroes series, Black Atlantic Crossings is now available in full-colour and black-and-white editions. You can find it on all major online booksellers, including Amazon and Waterstones.

Praise for Black Atlantic Crossings
As promised, Sabrina Gledhill’s research does, in fact, expand the Black Atlantic by putting into dialogue the ideas and activism of two giants of the African Diaspora in the Americas. The legacy of Booker T. Washington has been well known, including in Brazil, since the turn of the twentieth century. However, in addition to reinterpreting his legacy in a broader context, this book introduces the English-speaking reader to Manuel Querino, an insightful and multifaceted Afro-Brazilian thinker who is little known outside Brazil. Enjoy reading this original work, which is destined to become a classic.
João José Reis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil

Black Atlantic Crossings is a timely reflection on the challenges that African American intellectuals faced in the aftermaths of slavery in Brazil and the United States. While not always understood or accepted by later commentators, the anti-racist activism of Manoel Raimundo Querino and Booker T. Washington, ably analyzed by Sabrina Gledhill, profoundly challenged the emerging post-slavery hierarchies. She demonstrates that there is much to learn from these two men’s lives and the evolution of their historical memory in the century since their deaths.
Hendrik Kraay, University of Calgary, author of Bahia’s Independence: Popular Politics and Patriotic Festival in Salvador, Brazil, 1824-1900

Crossing the Atlantic requires navigating a sea of stories through rough and calm waters, amidst fleeting encounters and enduring dialogues. In this insightful work, Sabrina Gledhill offers more than just a theoretical compass. Her sophisticated approach reveals the profound oceanic connections that shaped Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, revisiting them as original Atlantic characters, without borders, but with transnational margins.
Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, co-author of The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic

“Destined to become a Classic”: Esteemed Scholars on Black Atlantic Crossings

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

I am delighted to share these blurbs from highly respected scholars:

As promised, Sabrina Gledhill’s research does, in fact, expand the Black Atlantic by putting into dialogue the ideas and activism of two giants of the African Diaspora in the Americas. The legacy of Booker T. Washington has been well known, including in Brazil, since the turn of the twentieth century. However, in addition to reinterpreting his legacy in a broader context, this book introduces the English-speaking reader to Manuel Querino, an insightful and multifaceted Afro-Brazilian thinker who is little known outside Brazil. Enjoy reading this original work, which is destined to become a classic.

João José Reis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia

Black Atlantic Crossings is a timely reflection on the challenges that African American intellectuals faced in the aftermaths of slavery in Brazil and the United States. While not always understood or accepted by later commentators, the anti-racist activism of Manoel Raimundo Querino and Booker T. Washington, ably analyzed by Sabrina Gledhill, profoundly challenged the emerging post-slavery hierarchies. She demonstrates that there is much to learn from these two men’s lives and the evolution of their historical memory in the century since their deaths.

Hendrik Kraay, University of Calgary, author of Bahia’s Independence: Popular Politics and Patriotic Festival in Salvador, Brazil, 1824-1900

Crossing the Atlantic requires navigating a sea of stories through rough and calm waters, amidst fleeting encounters and enduring dialogues. In this insightful work, Sabrina Gledhill offers more than just a theoretical compass. Her sophisticated approach reveals the profound oceanic connections that shaped Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, revisiting them as original Atlantic characters, without borders, but with transnational margins.

Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, co-author of The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic

Great news! Black Atlantic Crossings is officially here in Kindle e-book. paperback, and hardcover editions. Find your copy today at Amazon, Waterstones, and other booksellers.

Cover of Black Atlantic Crossings, by Sabrina Gledhill

On Historical Erasure

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / Leave a comment

Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” on March 17, 2025, documented the current US administration’s removal of content related to people of colour, women, and anyone else considered “DEI” from government websites, including figures buried in Arlington Cemetery and the Navajo code talkers. This is a real and present instance of the historical erasure my research seeks to counter. My edition of The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig Up Their Past was published in 2024 precisely to amplify Black scholars’ voices and ensure the preservation of historical narratives about soldiers and maroons of African descent, narratives that must be repeatedly shared and republished to prevent their being forgotten. That same year, I also published Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History. The title speaks for itself.

Carrying on this work, my forthcoming publication, Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino, expands on these themes. Here is the genesis of this book:

In the mid-1980s, I stumbled upon a figure who was largely unknown outside Brazil. Manuel Querino, an Afro-Brazilian polymath, was quoted in the epigraph to Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles. As I was then pursuing an MA in Latin American Studies at UCLA, I mentioned Querino to my supervisor, the esteemed E. Bradford Burns. It turned out that he had not only published an article about Querino and translated the introduction to one of his works but he had also featured Querino prominently in his History of Brazil. Rather than a biography, Professor Burns encouraged me to delve into a comparative study, contrasting Querino’s perspectives on Africans and their descendants with those of other Brazilian intellectuals active before 1930—a pivotal year when the academic study of Africans and their descendants gained acceptance in Brazil. These intellectuals included Nina Rodrigues, whom I positioned at one extreme of the spectrum of “racial pessimism,” with Querino at the other. Nina not only believed in Black inferiority but also that mixed-race people were destined to die out due to their moral and physical frailties.

In late 1986, I went to Brazil for preliminary PhD research and ended up staying for twenty-eight years—but that’s another story . While I hadn’t planned to continue studying Querino, I was incensed by the distortions of his legacy. Worse than being erased, his reputation had been actively tarnished by overtly racist interpretations of his life and work. For example, it was wrongly assumed that he died a pauper and was insignificant because he was buried in a “poor people’s cemetery” (a claim proven inaccurate). Academics cast doubt on whether Querino was the inspiration for Pedro Archanjo, the protagonist of Amado’s Tent of Miracles. His scholarly output was also underestimated. Meanwhile, Nina Rodrigues was celebrated as the father of anthropology in Brazil. Fortunately, I was not the only one who was passionate about defending Querino’s memory and retelling his story—accurately, this time. Scholars like Jaime Nascimento and Maria das Graças de Andrade Leal were also writing and editing books about him. Nascimento organised seminars and lectures and graciously included me in the line-up of speakers.

By the time I finally went on for a PhD at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in 2010, Leal had published a biography of Querino focussing on his work as a politician and labour leader. My interest was still focussed on his defence of Africans and their descendants, but since my PhD thesis had to be “original”, I decided to compare and contrast Querino with Booker T. Washington, a Black educator the Afro-Brazilian scholar specifically admired. The result was a study that was published in Brazil in 2020 as Travessias no Atlântico Negro: reflexões sobre Booker T. Washington e Manuel R. Querino. An expanded, updated translation is now in press, entitled Black Atlantic Crossings: The Lives and Anti-Racist Tactics of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino.

De/visualizing Blackness

/ Sabrina Gledhill, PhD / 1 Comment

mulher-negra-devassa

Condemned as racist and exploitative of black women, this controversial advert for Devassa dark beer did something far worse

Last week, I attended a thought-provoking seminar, ‘Visualizing Blackness in Latin America & the Caribbean, 16th-19th Centuries‘, held on 29 & 30 May 2018, and organised by the Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, London. Among many other interesting topics, in her keynote lecture, “Colour and Undertones: On Black Subjects in Latin-American Visual Culture”, Dr Tamara J. Walker mentioned an advert for Devassa dark beer which sparked controversy in Brazil a few years ago. In 2012, the National Council for Self-Regulation in Advertising (Conar) determined that the makers of Devassa – a product line that also includes a ‘blonde’ beer, and whose name is defined as ‘woman devoid of modesty or morals with regard to sex’, which could be translated as ‘slag’, ‘slut’ or worse – had to change the advert, as it was considered racist, a crime under Brazilian law.

When I saw the advert again after all these years, something else struck me about the image. Everyone at the seminar agreed that the woman portrayed is lovely and sexy in the old-fashioned pin-up style of glamour. The racism is more to be found in the text, which reads: ‘you can tell a true black woman [dark beer] by her [its] body’ (as the word for beer is feminine in Portuguese, this sort of double entendre is easily conveyed).

The main problem I saw with the image was that, according to Brazilian racial categories, the woman portrayed is not ‘black’ at all, but the classic sexualised and romanticised ‘mulata’ (once known in English as a ‘mulattress’). In other words, the text of the advert is not only racist and sexist, but the image has failed to represent black women as presumably intended – thereby effectively de/visualizing them and deleting them from the picture.

I had some difficulty explaining this to an African-American scholar, presumably because the one-drop rule in the US has led to greater solidarity and unified self-identification among a relatively small portion of the population, based on ancestry and the common experience of historical enslavement (as I argue in my PhD thesis, President Obama was only legitimised as a representative of the African-American community by his wife, Michelle, as his father came directly from Africa and therefore did not share that experience of historical enslavement), whereas in Brazil, African ancestry is so widespread that many people who would be considered black elsewhere see themselves as white or ‘brown’ (pardo). As a result, ‘blackness’ is based on appearance and placed at one extreme of a continuum, the other end of which is ‘whiteness’. There are many shades and categories in between.

In Brazil, ‘race’ is identified not through ancestry but through markers – particularly skin colour, features and hair. Although she has full lips – de rigueur among models and actresses of any ethnicity nowadays – the features of the woman in the advert are European and considered attractive according to the white racialist aesthetic, particularly her nose. Even among the very few black women who make it into the modelling world in Brazil, there is a distinct preference for those with a ‘nariz afinada’ – an aquiline or Roman nose. This is nothing new, as racialist discourse has long given preference to such noses, seeing them as superior to ‘snub’ or ‘broad/flat’ breathing apparatus (N.B. by way of full disclosure, I have a ‘snub’ or ‘retroussé’ nose, and although, as far as I am aware, I am ‘white’, a white supremacist once told me that I could be black, based on the shape of my nose and lips).

As I pointed out to my African-American interlocutor – and I hope I made clear then and now – I am not denying that the fictional woman portrayed could, and probably would, self-identify as black in Brazil. I am not negating her self-perceived Blackness. The problem with the picture is that, to be truly ‘black’ by Brazilian lights – especially in Bahia – she should look more like Zezé Mota or Taís Araújo. Better yet, to mention a more familiar example for non-Brazilians, she should strongly resemble Lupita Nyong’o.