Additional information
by Lorgia García Peña (Author)
An inspiring personal testimonial woven with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on the possibilities of creating spaces of freedom within the university for students and faculty of color who often experience violence and unbelonging due to the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that sustain academia and the university.
Sharing stories, personal reflections, and experiences, the author invites readers--in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women--to engage in liberatory practices of boycott and abolition, in contrast with the university's tokenizing and exploitative structures that shape our experiences in the academy, and hinder our possibilities of survival and success. Paired with radical community building, these practices are necessary for survival and critical for fighting back against a system that destroys us. One key site of freedom-making in the university is the classroom. Meditating on teaching ethnic studies, the author invites teachers to think about activism and social justice as central to what she calls "teaching in freedom," a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and the epistemologies that come from the Global South and from 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, to create, to live, and to succeed through our work.
Author Biography
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).
