Community as Rebellion by Lorgia Garca Pea

Community as Rebellion by Lorgia Garca Pea

“With characteristic clarity, courage, and conviction, Lorgia García Peña draws on her remarkable history as an engaged scholar and committed activist to demonstrate the necessity of living in community and accompanying others as keys to both personal liberation and social transformation” —George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

“Unflinching, brilliant, and absolutely necessary. In these pages, Lorgia García Peña shares her experiences—and others’—to reflect on what it means to be ‘the stranger’ in academia: that sole symbol for diversity that still remains an outsider. Unwavering in its clarity and compassion, this powerful book reminds us that true belonging comes from actively building communities unafraid to center care and rebellion. Everyone should read this.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

“‘What does it mean to teach for freedom?’ Dr. García Peña asks and boldly beckons us toward its practice across the policed borders of discipline, nation, theoretical traditions, and entrenched racial categories. A capacious thinker, rigorous researcher, brilliant activist, and path-breaking scholar, Dr. García Peña calls on us not simply, as she writes, to ‘mind the historical gaps’ for long-subjugated stories but alerts us to the ways these gaps have been historically mined in extractive ways in the service of colonial projects and neoliberal calls for diversity. Her astonishing work gathers us under its broad canopy to plot and persevere toward communal rebellion and renewal.” —Deborah Paredez, Columbia University

Lorgia García Peña is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar. Dr. García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University. She studies global Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on Black Latinidad. Dr. García Peña is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia and of Archives of Justice (Milan-Boston). Her book The Borders of Dominicanidad (Duke University Press 2016) won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize, the Isis Duarte Book Award in Haiti and Dominican Studies and the 2016 Latino/a Studies Book Award. She is the author of Translating Blackness (Duke University Press) and the co-editor of the Texas University Press Series Latinx: The Future is Now. She is a regular contributor to The Boycott Times, Asterix Journal and the North American Council on Latin America (NACLA).