“Foreign” Black Women: Confronting Xenophobic Antiblackness Globally

media release: This event is presented by the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice in collaboration with the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program (CLS), IRIS Global Connect, and the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS) at UW-Madison and with generous support from CLS and LACIS.

Dr. Lorgia García-Peña, Nave Visiting Scholar, 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 award winning books, 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), translated as La comunidad como rebelión (Haymarket, 2023). 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.

An engaged scholar committed to liberating education and bridging the gaps that separate the communities she comes from (Black, immigrant, working) and the university, Dr. García Peña is also a 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. She has been widely recognized for her public facing work: in 2022 she received the Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship, in 2021 the Margaret Casey Foundation named her a Freedom Scholar, and in 2017 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented her a Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Additionally, her scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship and the Mellon Foundation.

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.