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, as well as 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.
Professor Lorgia García Peña’s lecture is the second event in our continuing series New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Imagining Other Worlds. In this space, we focus on critics and intellectuals who, in their forms of writing and thinking, undo the divisions and separations between disciplines and genres, and between political action and intellectual engagement. In this practice of border/crossing, new languages and grammars can be imagined to signify other worlds to resist and oppose the imposed violence of colonial epistemes. These scholars, critics, and political actors offer the dynamism of indeterminacy, inviting practices that bring together words and worlds. Each visit will have two components, a lecture and then a seminar the following day led by the guest speaker, with readings and other materials available for those who sign up. More information on the seminar here: https://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/clas.html?event_ID=151...
Speakers
Franchesca Araujo is a 3rd year PhD student in Black Studies in the African American and African Diaspora Studies department. She is grounded in Caribbean studies and theory and is interested in black geographies and black cultural productions of the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Currently, she is writing about articulations of excess in black Dominican performance through musical production, and black geographies articulated through literature and poetry. Her other interests include Afro-Caribbean networks and lineages beyond language barriers and the nation state, and are grounded in the possibilities of an antillenité method as well as contesting the violences of latinidad and its dominant academic canon.
Lorgia García-Peña is the Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department in Studies of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University. She is also 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. She has been widely recognized for her public-facing work, including receiving the 2022 Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship.
Cosponsored
Hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies and cosponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and the Othering & Belonging Institute LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster.
Event Contact: janetwaggaman@berkeley.edu
Access Coordinator: Janet Waggaman, janetwaggaman@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2088