Manuel Raimundo Querino (1851-1923): Why post about Obama?

29/03/2008

Why post about Obama?

You may have been wondering why I'm publishing posts on the Obama campaign in a blog that's supposedly about an Afro-Brazilian who died 85 years ago and didn't even call himself "black."

The reason is this: the negative events taking place in the US as a result of a "half-black" African-American running for president have been plaguing Brazilians since Querino's lifetime. How can a person of African descent express Black Pride without making whites uncomfortable? Is it possible, as many whites allege, for a black person living in a white-dominated society to be a racist?

The questions of racial and cultural mixture, and efforts to overcome the massive gap beween black vs. white achievement and income levels when blacks received no means of "levelling the playing field" with whites, in terms of education or professional skills after "emancipation" in the US or Brazil have everything to do with Querino's life and struggle.

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About Manuel Querino

ln a racial climate that was at best condescending and at worst genocidal toward blacks, Manuel Querino helped pioneer the study of the Afro-Brazilians and their culture.

This blog is dedicated to the life, work and causes of this African-Brazilian scholar. The importance of his pioneering efforts in the study of Afro-Brazilian culture can only be understood in the perspective of the environment of pseudoscientific racism in which all intellectuals lived in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil.

By recognizing the contributions of Africans and their descendants to Brazil's national identity and culture, even a Brazilian "race," Querino displayed phenomenal independence of scholarship and mind. He defied the influence of European pseudoscientific racism in a country whose economy was partially based on racial slavery until 1888. Like most Brazilian intellectuals, Querino was seeking to provide a scientific or historical basis for a founding myth of Brazilian nationality and culture: in searching for the characteristic that gave their country and people their unique identity, he chose the fait accompli and undeniable fact of widespread cultural and biological miscegenation.

Quotations

> "Here it was the work of blacks that sustained the nobility and prosperity of Brazil for centuries, without fail; it was as a result of their work that we have scientific institutions, letters, arts, commerce, industry, etc. Therefore, they have played an outstanding role as a factor in Brazilian civilization.” - Manuel Querino
> "Brazil has two great glories: the bounty of its soil and the talent of the mestiço." - Manuel Querino
> "The generosity of the human spirit can overcome all adversity. Through compassion and caring, we create...hope." - Nelson Mandela
> "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
> "Until the lion writes his own story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." - African proverb
> "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.... One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." - W.E.B. DuBois
> "From a genetic perspective, all humans are Africans, either residing in Africa or in recent exile." - Svante Pääbo (Swedish biologist specialized in evolutionary genetics)
> "There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life." - Booker T. Washington
> "We have to recognize that the price of equality in pluralism, like the price of liberty, is eternal vigilance." - Carl N. Degler

Querinophiles and Querinologists

Several scholars have focussed on Querino in works published and produced in Brazil and the US over the past few decades, including Jorge Calmon, Pedro Calmon, E. Bradford Burns, Jaime Nascimento, Jaime Sodré, Maria das Graças Andrade Leal, David Brookshaw, Emanoel Araújo, Luiz Alberto Ribeiro Freire, Eliane Nunes, Kim Butler, Vivaldo da Costa Lima, Antonio Sergio Alfredo Guimarães and Waldeloir Rego. The greatest "Querinophile" of all was Jorge Amado, who drew inspiration from Querino's life and works when creating Pedro Archanjo, the protagonist of Tent of Miracles.

Background

My interest in Manuel Querino began when I was studying for my MA in Latin American Studies at UCLA in the early 1980s. After reading Jorge Amado's Tent of Miracles, I learned that the protagonist was largely inspired by Querino's life and works. My MA advisor, the late E. Bradford Burns, shared my interest in Querino and urged me to write his biography. It has taken me a long time to get around to it - I moved to Brazil shortly after graduating in 1986 and spent 28 years there making a living as a translator and raising a family before returning to the UK. In addition to researching Querino's life and Brazilian race relations in general, my PhD in Ethnic Studies at CEAO/UFBA focussed on the intellectual history of the African diaspora through two figures: Manuel R. Querino and Booker T. Washington. I recently published a version of my thesis in Portuguese and am working on the English edition. Suggestions and/or critiques of this blog will be warmly and gratefully welcomed.

-- Sabrina Gledhill