AWARD-WINNING SCHOLAR ON BLACKNESS, COLONIALISM & MIGRATION; CO-FOUNDER OF FREEDOM UNIVERSITY GEORGIA; AUTHOR
Dr. Lorgia García Peña is a first-generation Black Latina scholar and currently serves as a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and as co-editor of the University of Texas Press series, Latinx, the Future is Now.
Through a transnational, multidisciplinary lens, grounded on humanistic approaches to history and literature, García Peña studies Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on Black Latinx. Her work is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. Her research insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives paying attention to the intersections of blackness, colonialism and migration, and centering Black Latinx lives.
Dr. García Peña is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer and migrant. Dr. García Peña is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, Fall 2016) which won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies and of Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, Fall 2022) which also won the Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies in 2023, and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, May 2022). She also won the LASA Latinx Studies for Community as Rebellion and the Barbara Christian Book Award for Translating Blackness in 2023.
In 2022, Dr. García Peña received the prestigious Angela Davis Prize for public scholarship. In 2021, she was named a Freedom Scholars by the Margaret Casey Foundation. In 2018, she received the Martin Luther King, Jr. fellowship by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, in 2017, she received the Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Her work has been supported by Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. García Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University.
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Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces within institutions that exclude women and queer people of color, particularly institutions of learning. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, she invites us—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.
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In 2020 we saw the world coming together to protest state-sanctioned antiblackness in the United States. This happened as the world shut down, leaving to die the most vulnerable amongst us, as migrants continue to cross oceans and desserts in search for safety and as countries closed their borders with walls and military actions to keep poor and Black people out. Translating Blackness invites us to think about the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia operate together producing new forms of racialized exclusion throughout the world. Lorgia García Peña invites us to think about antiblackness as a pandemic, looking at its roots in the histories of overlapping colonialisms that have shaped the greater part of our modern world. She invites us to translate blackness, to think beyond our national contexts, in order to create networks and communities of empowerment and hope.
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This presentation centers the work of educators in shaping our society and world. Addressing teachers, Lorgia García Peña argues for making the classroom a “freedom space”, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
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Who are Black Latinxs? What significant historical nexus shape Black Latinx experiences? What has produced the erasure, silencing and marginalization of Black Latinxs in the United States and beyond? What can Black Latinidad teach us about the future of Global blackness, particularly as it intersects with immigration, and other forms of minoritized and colonized subjectivities? This talk traces the narrative history of what she call the “Latinx difference” through which Black Latinx people are erased from the great stories and foundational narratives of the nation(s) they helped build. But while projected as outsider to both Black and Latinxs communities, identities, political struggles across the hemisphere and beyond, Lorgia García Peña argues Black Latinx are foundational to the projects of Black citizenship and of Transnational Latinx consciousness. Understanding Black Latinidad, getting acquainted with its histories, she argues, can help us better see the relationship between past and present exclusions: how colonial histories continue to shape present-day oppression of minoritized people of color.