Community as Rebellion

"A life-saving and life-affirming text, Community as Rebellion offers us the trenchant analysis and fearless strategy radical scholar-activists have long needed. But Lorgia García Peña’s intervention is especially valuable at this moment, as we collectively consider how our most important social institutions might be reimagined beyond the strongholds of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism more broadly."
—Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom is a Constant Struggle

“Community as Rebellion is a must read for anyone serious about confronting institutional racism, sexism, and elitism. Lorgia García Peña, one of her generation's most brilliant scholar-activists, challenges us to confront academia as a ‘colonial and colonizing’ space as the first step toward resistance and transformation. Her own experiences undergird her analysis and serve as a powerful call to action.” 
—Barbara Ransby, author of *Eslanda

*“Lorgia García Peña is one of the few courageous and brilliant intellectuals grounded in rigorous and visionary grassroots education. This pedagogical guide for genuine freedom struggles is so badly needed in our neo-fascist times!”
—Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary

“Unflinching, brilliant, and absolutely necessary. In these pages, Lorgia García Peña shares her experiences—and others’—to reflect on what it means to be ‘the stranger’ in academia: that sole symbol for diversity that still remains an outsider. Unwavering in its clarity and compassion, this powerful book reminds us that true belonging comes from actively building communities unafraid to center care and rebellion. Everyone should read this.” 
—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

"‘What does it mean to teach for freedom?’ Dr. García Peña asks and boldly beckons us toward its practice across the policed borders of discipline, nation, theoretical traditions, and entrenched racial categories. A capacious thinker, rigorous researcher, brilliant activist, and path-breaking scholar, Dr. García Peña calls on us not simply, as she writes, to ‘mind the historical gaps’ for long-subjugated stories but alerts us to the ways these gaps have been historically mined in extractive ways in the service of colonial projects and neoliberal calls for diversity. Her astonishing work gathers us under its broad canopy to plot and persevere toward communal rebellion and renewal.” 
—Deborah Paredez, Columbia University

“With characteristic clarity, courage, and conviction, Lorgia García Peña draws on her remarkable history as an engaged scholar and committed activist to demonstrate the necessity of living in community and accompanying others as keys to both personal liberation and social transformation.” 
—George Lipsitz, author, *The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

“Community as Rebellion is partly an incisive and deeply personal expose of the neoliberal university and its racializing and patriarchal practices of denigrating women of color scholars while extracting their intellectual, administrative, and emotional labor. But it is, above all, a mandate to transform higher education that begins with recognizing our mutual obligations to each other and to the world we study, extending 'community' beyond the ivory tower, and co-creating with our students new, autonomous intellectual spaces. Lorgia García Peña wrote this book not from a dream or an abstract theory but from building rebel communities for over a decade. She knows that there can be no free education without freedom.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination*

Préface

• Author book tour and speaking engagements at academic conferences • Galley mailing to reps, bookstores, media, and available on request • Social media influencer campaign to promote the book • Pitch author for interviews on TV, radio and podcast • Promote through the author’s extensive academic and abolitionist networks • Pitch excerpts and reviews to New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, New Yorker, Harper's, La Raza, Washington Post, and more • Pitch to social justice reading lists like Zinn Education Project, NACLA and more

Auteur

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 and a Casey Foundation 2021 Freedom Scholar. 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). 

Texte du rabat

A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color.

Résumé
A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color.

Contenu

**Table of Contents:

1. On being "the One": The first chapter relates the challenges of being tokenized within the academy as a women of color scholar. The chapter provides personal examples and posits a proposition to contrast the individualistic model of success with one of community.

2. Complicity: This chapter lays out what the author considers a structure of complicity that sustains unequal labor practices that systematically affect women of color. Based on a series of interviews and autoethnographic interventions, the chapter takes on tenure, labor appropriation, mentoring as some of the main sites of complicity.

3. Freedom: This chapter proposes teaching as an act of freedom making and offers practical examples of how to teach in/for freedom, how to create communities that promote collective learning and engage in justice-making practices in the classroom that can lead to long-term positive changes in our society.

4. Ethnic Studies as Rebellion: This final chapter meditates on ethnic studies as a critical site from which to fight against the hegemonic practices of exclusion that uphold Eurocentric and Euro-American knowledge as the only way to see the world while relegating knowledge that comes from everywhere else to the periphery. The chapter is an invitation to rebel through centering subjugated knowledge and the epistemologies of oppressed peoples.