Black Atlantic Crossings: Discover the ground-breaking anti-racist strategies of Booker T. Washington and Manuel R. Querino in this insightful translation and adaptation. Explore the transatlantic exchange of ideas that shaped Black activism in the early 20th century.
Dance of the Serpent: Delve into the captivating life story of capoeira mestre Cobra Mansa. From his early days in Brazil to his international influence, this biography traces his journey as a martial artist, teacher, and cultural ambassador.
Stay tuned for release dates and pre-order information!
Black history isn’t confined to a single month—it’s a living, breathing tapestry woven into the fabric of our world. At Funmilayo, we’re committed to sharing these vital stories every day of the year. But because it is officially Black History Month in the USA, we are celebrating with special ebook deals on our Unsung Heroes in Black History Series on Amazon.com: Heroes Sung and Unsung and Manuel Querino (1851-1923) are free, and The Need for Heroes is only $0.99. Discover the richness of Black history!
As white supremacy resurges and attempts to erase Black history intensify, our publications stand as an act of resistance. They showcase essays by Black intellectuals, demonstrating the enduring strength and resilience of Black people in the face of prejudice. Our books amplify Black voices from the US and Brazil, clearly showing that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora have always defied racist stereotypes. Ironically, even proponents of scientific racism acknowledged Black artistic talent–a rare point of agreement with the intellectuals whose work we champion.
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.'”
20 November marks the anniversary of the assassination of Zumbi dos Palmares, the best-known leader of Brazil’s most famous and enduring quilombo. This maroon settlement was established in the mountains of what is now Pernambuco by enslaved people who self-emancipated by escaping bondage.
This year, we published an anthology entitled The Need for Heroes. It contains writings by Black intellectuals from the US and Brazil that celebrate the heroism of maroons and soldiers who fought for liberation. One of the authors is Manuel Querino, writing about Palmares over a century ago.
Recently, Brazilian actress Tais Araújo posted a photograph of herself on Instagram, with a copy of Projeto Querino, by journalist Tiago Rogero. Earlier, on 31 October, Tiago published an article in The Guardian about his book, explaining how it developed from the Projeto Querino podcast, which, in turn, was inspired by the New York Times‘s 1619 Project. That article contained a link to this website, boosting its visitors considerably. According to Tiago:
“Projeto Querino is based on a journalistic project that involved a team of more than 40 people, over two years and seven months of work. Inspired by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, it launched in 2022 as a podcast produced by Rádio Novelo and a series of magazine articles. Before joining the Guardian in April, I spent another year conducting further research and writing the book. A central idea was to understand and illustrate how Black people participated in crucial moments of Brazilian history – such as independence in 1822 or the extensively delayed abolition of slavery in 1888 – something that some school curriculums and parts of the media refuse to acknowledge. Its name is a tribute to Manuel Raimundo Querino (1851-1923), a groundbreaking Brazilian intellectual born free in Bahia state. He is considered the first person to portray Africans and Afro-descendants positively in the country’s historiography.”
Tiago Rogero and the historian Ynaê Lopes dos Santos interviewed Sabrina Gledhill about Manuel Querino for the podcast in 2021, and Projeto Querino was launched in 2022. Sabrina`s interview can be found in episode 4 (the link is to the PDF in English).
The next major project was Isis Gledhill’s bio-documentary on Querino, which was launched on YouTube in November 2023 and has already racked up over 8,500 views and been selected for screening at two Brazilian film festivals. Tiago and Ynaê gave interviews for the documentary, as did Sabrina and several other scholars who study Querino.
Someone asked if the Projeto Querino book was competing with Funmilayo’s anthology Manuel Querino (1851-1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racism. The answer is not at all. We are very pleased that the word is getting out there about Manuel Querino and his legacy. Tiago has used the platform of The Guardian to spread the word about his own book, while generously sharing a link that enables his readers to find out more about Querino through our publications. One of these days, our work will be done, but as long as the process of erasure continues, “a luta continua” (the fight goes on).
The only book I had in mind back in 2020 was an anthology on Manuel Querino, the Afro-Brazilian scholar I have been studying and writing about since the 1980s. I had just published a book in Portuguese based on my PhD thesis comparing Querino to Booker T. Washington, and I was being urged to publish something about Querino in English. I had also written several essays that had appeared in Brazilian peer-reviewed journals and books over the years and would make a small volume. Then, it occurred to me that Querino’s activities were so varied, covering a gamut of specialisms, that it is impossible for one person to write authoritatively about them all.
Fortunately, I had access to writings by E. Bradford Burns (the first bibliographic essay on Querino published in English), Jeferson Bacelar and Carlos Doria (on his pioneering study of Bahian cuisine), Eliane Nunes (on his contributions to art history), Jorge Calmon (on his involvement in labour mobilisation and politics), and Christianne Vasconcellos (on his use of photographs in anthropology) to add to my own writings . The result was Manuel Querino (1851-1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racism, a compendium that has also been published in Portuguese (without Burns’s essay, due to translation rights), and has been very well received.
That book was published in 2021, during the Covid pandemic. Lockdown was a wonderful opportunity to focus on organising and translating the anthology. In the years since, I have worked on translating and updating a monograph based on my PhD thesis, which has been in peer review with another publisher for several months. The Unsung Heroes series began with the second volume, which I first approached as “something to do” while awaiting the verdict on my own book. It all started with Querino, naturally. I had originally intended to publish my translation of one of his most significant works (for me), O colono preto como fator da civilização brasileira, translated as The African Contribution to Brazilian Civilisation.
First, I was intrigued by parallels between Querino’s story and that of Arthur (born Arturo) Schomburg. Then, I started wondering which works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, and other Black thinkers were comparable to Querino’s essay, which demands recognition for the achievements of Africans and their descendants. Instead of being seen as passive sources of manual labour, Querino asserted that they contributed knowledge they brought from their homelands, such as mining and metalworking, as well as helping maintain Brazil’s territorial integrity as soldiers. He also emphasised their ingenuity and courage in breaking free from the bonds of slavery to form their own communities, known as quilombos in Brazil.
That initial curiosity led to a gold mine of works on Black soldiers and maroons, which I added to Querino’s essay to produce The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig Up their Past, published in June 2024. I realised that the concept of Unsung Heroes, inspired by the title of Elizabeth Ross Haynes’s book of children’s stories, extended to the anthology on Querino. He was well known in life, having achieved such renown in Brazil that several newspapers published his obituary in his home state (Bahia), Rio de Janeiro, and other parts of the country. Representatives of trade unions and academia attended his funeral, which was also covered by the press. But since the 1930s, he had been gradually forgotten, and if remembered at all, thought of as a lightweight scholar, the minor author of a few pamphlets, and even illiterate. There seemed to have been a deliberate effort on the part of the “hegemonic narrative” to rewrite his story as that of a poor, ill-educated Black man who made a stab at anthropology but didn’t quite succeed. This disinformation was convenient because he already contradicted the commonly held notion that all Blacks in Brazil were enslaved until Abolition in 1888, and since then had been nothing but vagrants, thieves, and scoundrels – an image still maintained in the media.
While the eminent Brazilian historian Flavio Gomes was writing the afterword for The Need for Heroes (it was worth the wait), I started putting together works that hadn’t quite fit in that collection and adding many more. Once again, I started with Querino, who is considered the Brazilian Vasari because his pioneering works on the history of art in Bahia were based on biographies of artists. The result was Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History, a compendium of works by Querino, as well as Arthur Schomburg, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Benjamin Brawley, James M. Trotter, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and others, with a foreword and afterword by brilliant contemporary artists and writers: Mark Steven Greenfield, from the USA, and Ayrson Heráclito and Beto Heráclito, from Brazil. It joins the first two titles, Manuel Querino (1851-1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racismand The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig Up their Past, which are also available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle e-book editions.
When I’m asked what’s next, the answer seems obvious—an anthology about Black women heroes, “sung and unsung.” I might even reclaim the word “heroine.” I haven’t come up with a title yet, and I may have to write most of the bios myself, but it is something to look forward to. Watch this space.
This post is an adaptation of an essay published in Heroes Sung and Unsung
A moving response to The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig up their Past
The book is extremely timely, given the state/conditions of the politics of the US currently.
It is good having all this detailed background information in one place. It provides historical background/examples of how and why the current politic and society have reached this point.
The essays of the authors and stories of various heroes humanize them: enslaved Harriet Tubman doing housework to the displeasure of her mistress, Booker T. Washington’s friendship with Charles Banks of Mount Bayou, Mississippi and with Bishop George W. Clinton of Lancaster, South Carolina, the town where my ancestors lived.
Learning about individuals of the years immediately after slavery making their way in the post-slavery era in US is extremely important, not to mention those who struggled for Freedom before the Civil War. Learning about Blacks who were not enslaved, like Crispus Attucks, but struggled for the freedom during American Revolutionary War was eye opening, as well as details of abuses/discrimination against Blacks after the 1812 war.
For myself, I can say “Heroes” makes me want to know and read more about Black people/heroes, past and present, who have contributed to the march forward to Freedom. A copy of The Need for Heroes should be in the home of all “Black Folk” and other Americans!
It all started with a deep dive into the life of Afro-Brazilian scholar Manuel Querino. I was fascinated by his work, but quickly realised one book couldn’t do justice to his vast contributions. That’s when the idea struck: an anthology, a collection of voices to paint a fuller picture.
That first book, published during the enforced idleness of lock-down, opened the door to something bigger. I found myself drawn to other forgotten heroes, their stories echoing Querino’s own. Carter G. Woodson, Arthur Schomburg, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington – these giants and others had also paved the way, challenging the same tired narratives about Black people.
One book became two, then three. The “Unsung Heroes” series was born, not from a grand plan, but from a genuine curiosity about the lives history tried to erase. These weren’t just stories about Black soldiers or maroons or artists; they were about resilience, about brilliance pushing back against erasure.
Querino himself was a target of this erasure, his legacy twisted to fit a convenient narrative. But we’re setting the record straight. The “Unsung Heroes” series isn’t just about remembering; it’s about reclaiming, about amplifying voices that have been silenced for far too long.
So, whether you’re discovering Querino for the first time or exploring the works of other trailblazers, I invite you to join me on this journey. Let’s rewrite the past, together.
Explore the Series:
NEW: Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History
Manuel Querino (1851-1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racism
The Need for Heroes: Black Intellectuals Dig Up Their Past
Prepare to be captivated and inspired by the untold stories of Black artistic brilliance across continents and centuries. “Heroes Sung and Unsung” is a groundbreaking anthology that shines a light on the hidden corners of art history, celebrating visionaries whose contributions have long been overlooked.
Delve into essays by figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Arthur Schomburg, Manuel Querino, and Benjamin Brawley, as they illuminate the struggles and triumphs of Black artists in their own words. From the foreword by Mark Steven Greenfield to the afterword by Ayrson Heráclito and Beto Heráclito, this lavishly illustrated volume is a testament to the enduring power of Black artistic expression.
Discover the breathtaking beauty of the Benin Bronzes, the evocative landscapes of forgotten painters, and the powerful verses of overlooked poets. This anthology pays homage to the sculptors, composers, photographers, and countless other artists whose works have shaped the world we know today.
From a guild of metalworkers in Africa to a sculptress who studied with Rodin. Famous writers who were “whitened” and nearly erased from Black history. A budding landscape artist who died too young. The Coleridge-Taylors: the father, a famous composer, the son of a Black physician from Sierra Leone and a White Englishwoman; and his daughter, also a composer, but whose music is only just being heard, some 80 years after it was written. You will find their stories and many more.
With essays unearthed through meticulous research and stunning visuals, “Heroes Sung and Unsung” is an essential addition to any library. It is a call to action, a reminder that the history of art is incomplete without the voices and visions of Black artists, both sung and unsung.
Editora Funmilayo Publishing 