CATEGORIES: Past Events
When: THURSDAY OCTOBER 1, 2020, AT 7PM
Where: Webex Virtual event URL –> bit.ly/3gMTbNS
Prof. García Peña is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke University Press, 2016) a study of the impact of stories — historical and fictional — on the national and racial identity of a people. Offering the Dominican experience as case study, this book shows how the stories of a nation create marginality through acts of exclusion. These exclusionary acts are linked to the tensions between colonial desire and the aspiration for political independence. The book also shows how these official stories of exclusion, though influential in shaping a country’s identity, are always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through acts of resistance linked to the tensions between history — what is perceived as evidence of fact — and fiction — what is presumed to be invention: cultural productions, oral histories, and rumors. The Borders of Dominicanidad is the winner of Winner of 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. She is presently finishing her second book, forthcoming with Duke University Press, Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives engages various geopolitical spaces: Latin America, the United States and Europe, providing a new cartography for understanding contemporary Latinidad as resulting from the vaivén of peoples and ideas across geographical and imaginary spaces. Specifically, her research analyzes how black Latin American 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. The book historicizes Afrolatinidad as a productive category of contestation but one that is also restricted by colonial regimes that continue to operate in the nation.