Marc Hertzman and Petrônio Domingues
In Black Radical: The Life and Times of Édison Carneiro, Marc Hertzman (UIUC) and Petrônio Domingues (Universidade Federal de Sergipe) explore the remarkable life and intellectual production of Édison Carneiro, one of Brazil’s great (but forgotten) thinkers. A Black activist and scholar, Carneiro indelibly shaped twentieth-century Brazil. Our book places him at the intersection of five key overlapping debates and processes: (1) the contested emergence and consolidation of twentieth-century Brazilian racial ideology; (2) the formation of a diverse, multi-layered Black intelligentsia; (3) the inscription of gendered hierarchies within that intelligentsia and in Brazilian higher education; (4) the creation and institutionalization of modern Brazilian scholarly disciplines, a process that marginalized Carneiro and elevated “hard” social-science research above the study of culture and other “soft” disciplines; (5) the rise and fall of Marxist-inflected social movements and intellectual currents. This will be the first study of Carneiro in English and by far the most thorough and critical study in Portuguese. We will publish the book with a university press in the United States and then immediately have the text translated into Portuguese for publication in Brazil.
The authors come to this project from diverse backgrounds and perspectives–and bring years of research on Carneiro and the larger milieus that he inhabited and shaped in Brazil. Petrônio Domingues is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal de Sergipe (UFS). One of Brazil’s leading Black intellectuals, and one of the most respected scholars of race and Black intellectual history in Brazil, his many works include those on Afro-Brazilian associations, Black agency, and Black intellectuals and leaders. In 2020, he was a finalist for the prestigious Jabuti Prize (often referred as the “Brazilian Pulitzer”). Marc Hertzman is Professor of History at UIUC. He completed several years of research on Carneiro before moving to a project inspired by Hertzman-Domingues Collaborative Grant Proposal Summary for Newsletter (May 2025) Carneiro’s famous book on Palmares, Brazil’s famed maroon society. Hertzman has been at Illinois for thirteen years and in 2023-24 served as Acting Associate Director at the Lemann Center.
Drawing on the research that Hertzman already completed and additional, ongoing work by Domingues, the authors will use the Lemann collaborative grant for a year of intensive work on the monograph, which they intend to publish with a university press in the United States and then immediately translate into Portuguese for publication in Brazil.