Menu
This chapter utilizes the words, actions, and impacts of Frederick Douglass and Gregorio Luperón to analyze the relationship between the project of US imperial expansion over the Caribbean and the project of US Black citizenship during the two decades that followed the US Civil War. I argue that this relationship is central to Black Latinidad.
Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is a first-generation Black Latina scholar from Trenton, New Jersey. 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 Latinidad. Her work emphasizes social justice, women of color feminism and Afro-Latinx episteme. She has a strong commitment to undocumented communities, and first-generation students of color.
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’s first book The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, Fall 2016) 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.
Dr. García Peña has two forthcoming books, Translating Blackness: The Vaivén and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, Fall 2022) looks at how Black Latinx migrants and their descendants grapple with various racial systems finding ways to translate racial meaning across national contexts while carving a space of belonging and representation within the nation (s) that often exclude them and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, January 2022) a meditation of teaching Ethnic Studies as a woman of color in the academy.
Dr. García Peña is the 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the recipient of the 2017 Disobedience Award, Ford Foundations Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016), The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010), the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship (2010), and the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2006). 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.