Translating Blackness: Lorgia García Peña and Barbara Ransby in Conversation

On Wednesday, April 12th, 2023, the UIC Social Justice Initiative, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, and the Rafael Cintron Ortiz Latino Cultural Center, welcomed author and activist Lorgia García Peña and SJI Director Barbara Ransby, for "Translating Blackness, A Conversation."

"In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences."

Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is a writer, activist and scholar who specializes in Latinx Studies with a focus on Black Latinidades. 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. Through her writing and teaching, Dr. García Peña insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives. She is the author of three books , the award-winning The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016) which was translated and published in Spanish by Editorial Bonó in 2020; Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective(Duke, 2022) and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, 2022). Additionally, her work has been covered in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Review and Harper’s Bazaar. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Univision and Telemundo and is a regular contributor to NACLA and Asterix Journals.