Temple University Press Journals
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Situating Blackness and Antiracism in a Global Frame: Key Works for a Study of the Dominican Republic
No full textThis syllabus provides a starting point for those interested in learning and teaching about race and Blackness in the Dominican Republic, both within and beyond the U.S. academic context. While the dominant narrative emerging from the United States tends to cast all Dominicans as both anti-Black and anti-Haitian, the Dominican Republic has a long history of Black liberation that can be understood only if we pay attention to the complicated, nuanced, and historical ways in which race and national identities, as in all places, have been constructed by various groups and forces. This reading list provides a point of departure for understanding the many scholarly and public-facing works in English that have, over the past decade, grappled with these many complications of race, nation, and identity-making. Specifically, it traces the three main frameworks that have become axiomatic in the field for contextualizing Dominican concepts of race and nation: (1) island-wide struggles for sovereignty and emancipation across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the powerful forces of neocolonialism that facilitated U.S. occupation of the island in the early twentieth century, and (3) the struggles for modern sovereignty and the legacies of occupation that resulted in dictatorial leadership across Hispaniola, namely by François and Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti and Rafael Trujillo and Joaquín Balaguer in the Dominican Republic
The Cost of Freedom: The Violent Exploitation of Black Labor as Essential to Nation Building in Jamaica and the United States of America
No full textWith a specific focus on labor, our goal is to demonstrate the inherent violence located within nation-building projects that have performed the slippage of equating freedom with the freedom of people to choose their labor (i.e., wage labor). It is within this context that we situate “work” and “labor” as antithetical to Blackness. Similar to the transmutation of freedom to free labor by the financial and industrial class during Reconstruction, Western constructions of labor and work have been utilized as modalities to suppress liberation. Utilizing interlocutors within Black studies who have theorized the relationship between statecraft and Blackness, we foreground Blackness as a way to move beyond the geographic boundaries of nations in order to understand the intent of capital formations that have demanded the gross exploitation of Black labor throughout the African diaspora. To this end, while our argument is based within Jamaica and the United States, we utilize models of the plantation and the carceral state to demonstrate that the usages of labor as a racialized disciplining force are not bounded to national demarcations. Further, we document how Western nations react to Black radical organizing and communal development in order to suppress ideological formations that expose the decadent and corrupt nature of Western modalities of being that are centered on vile exploitation
Enduring the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Imperatives in the Defense of Black Lives in Brazil
No full textFor the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil and the United States were both under the rule of right-wing conservatives who focused on the pandemic’s impact on the economy, pushing for a reopening of “business as usual” while disregarding the deadly impact of COVID-19 on those considered essential workers. In light of racialized colonial legacies, the large majority of this labor force are people of color, who belong to the most vulnerable sectors of the population. In both countries, Black and Indigenous peoples have been disproportionally bearing the brunt of this pandemic in comparison to whites. This article illustrates how Black communities in Brazil have crafted strategies and created alliances in order to overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic. Afro-Brazilians resist and provide alternative responses to the barriers posed by decades of colonial violence and state negligence, which set up complex and layered preexisting structural conditions of socioeconomic exclusion and disenfranchisement. Moreover, this article provides a critical framework for understanding the pedagogies of everyday resistance and the multifaceted strategies communities have forged in order to survive and respond to the social and racial impact of the pandemic
Shattering Silences: Dictions, Contradictions, and Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads
No full textThe denial of tenure at Harvard to Lorgia García-Peña is a defeat for academic excellence and for social justice. Yet the mechanisms deployed to enact it are so transparently illegitimate that it holds the potential to be the kind of short-term defeat that points the way toward long-term victory in the future. The tenure denial is an insult and an injury that demands a collective response from antiracist and decolonial scholars. Turning indignation into action requires receiving the message sent by Harvard not as it was intended, as a warning to other scholars against walking down the trail blazed by García-Peña, but instead as a prompt toward the opposite conclusion, to choose to follow in her footsteps. Her dismissal from the Harvard faculty can be one of those moments in history when repression goes too far, becomes too transparent, compromises its own credibility, and comes back to haunt its perpetrators. This can become a watershed moment for the field of ethnic studies and the constituencies to which it is accountable if ethnic studies teachers and students analyze, interpret, and build on it in the right ways
Three Essays toward Care in and beyond Academia
No full textRadical practices of care rooted in feminist praxis and the lessons we have learned from Professor Lorgia García-Peña are fundamental to our pedagogy and our imagination of a more just future. We insist on a need for care practices across the university—in the abolitionist visions of the future of higher education, in student-led ethnic studies movements on college campuses, and in feminist pedagogical and reading practices. Grounded in transnational feminist thought and praxis that centralizes collectivity, community, and interdependence, our essays incorporate the lessons we have learned from García-Peña and our organizing efforts for ethnic studies as graduate students at Harvard to challenge the exploitative, capitalist, and violent practices of neoliberal universities. Through personal narrative, testimony, cultural and historical analysis, and poetry, this interdisciplinary piece insists that the humanities are indefensible without a focus on ethnic studies methodologies
Discovering Dominga: Indigenous Migration and the Logics of Indigenous Displacement
No full textThis article examines the ways in which Indigenous migrants are folded into the logics of settler colonialism through an analysis of the human rights film Discovering Dominga (2003). The documentary follows Denese Joy Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz, who was adopted by a white family as a child, as she comes to learn that she is a survivor of the 1982 Río Negro Massacres committed in Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, against the Maya Achí people. Through visual analysis I examine how Indigenous displacement and transnational adoption are contextualized within the film to reproduce settler-colonial logics of Native elimination. Through a transnational reading of Indigeneity, this article argues that the film emphasizes Indigenous genocide as something that occurs only in other countries and not in Denese/Dominga’s U.S. hometown of Algona, Iowa. As a result, the film erases Algona’s own history of Indigenous dispossession and absolves everyday white U.S. citizens of extending to Indigenous migrant people the genocidal practices produced through settler colonialism
Radical Mutual Aid, International Working-Class Struggle, Antiracist Organizing: An Interpretation of Club Cubano Inter-Americano’s History
No full textThis article excavates the histories interwoven through the functioning of Club Cubano Inter-Americano (CCI), an organization founded in 1945 by a group of mostly Afro-Cuban migrants in New York City. In essence, the transnational nature of CCI’s space of reception and congregation offered a significant opportunity for mutual aid to supranationally networked peoples with distinct ideologies, cultural backgrounds, and interests. Operating at the overlaps of micro-cultural change and macro-cultural diffusion, leaders consolidated preexisting transnational information networks that shaped the relationship between Cuba and its diaspora in New York City. Examining émigré legacies of community-building and organizing, as lived during the mid-twentieth century, the paper establishes transhistorical linkages that show the daily articulations of resistance to structures of anti-immigration and anti-Blackness. In particular, the analysis highlights efforts in the context of a struggle against discrimination, environmental racism, and geographies of cultural alienation. By telling a story of communal uplift, the paper brings to life a history that lays bare the undergirding logics of public health shortcomings for urban populations, past and present, in a period of intensifying imperialism
Your Mirada. Gracias. Siempre: Afro-Asia, Intimacies, and Women-of-Color Feminisms
No full textThis essay considers the dialogue that scholar Lorgia García-Peña and performance artist Josefina Báez have co-created to explore connections between Asia and Africa in the Americas. Situating their praxis in women-of-color feminisms, I describe their endeavors to build coalition across historical and material difference. Finally, I contextualize how chosen ties between Asian and African diasporic subjects actively refuse imperial and capitalist histories that have sought to divide and separate them
Bringing Dominican History from the Footnote to the Center of the Page
No full textThrough her scholarship, pedagogy, and activism, Lorgia García-Peña has fought for a centering of Dominicans and Dominican studies, dominicanidad, and the island of Hispaniola itself in larger scholarly and public imaginations. Particularly in the aftermath of Harvard’s intellectually marginalizing decision to deny tenure to García-Peña, her work continues to remind us what we risk losing by not engaging with her set of intertwined practices of centering. She implores us to address the Dominican “footnote condition” but also to think about how this condition afflicts other areas of study. In this article I argue that García-Peña’s academic contributions, particularly around this centering practice, have highlighted the relevance of the island to key concerns of history as a discipline but also how the recent, expanding literature on Hispaniola and “transnational Hispaniola” underscores its significance in a more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and pedagogically grounded approach to our collective pasts and presents in the university, in the nation-state, and on the globe. I argue that it is intellectually and pedagogically crucial that we stop allowing Hispaniola and its diaspora to be allocated such a marginalized place in academia, and I point to the ways we can use García-Peña’s work—on the page and embodied—to think about a more holistic understanding of the island’s scholarly and contemporary impact
“The Blackness That Incriminated Me”: Stigma and Normalization in Brothers and Keepers
No full textThis research situates Brothers and Keepers, the memoir of John Edgar Wideman (one of the greatest writers of the past hundred years), within the tradition of Black sociology, arguing that it politicizes the theories in Stigma, the foundational study by Erving Goffman (one of the greatest sociologists of the past hundred years), by grounding them in the lived experience of an African American man. In turn, Goffman’s writing facilitates a reading of Wideman’s work as an attempt to surrender the mask of the “exceptional” Black man among elite whites and reconcile his stellar accomplishments with his stigmatized beginnings as well as his brother’s incarceration. With this effort, Wideman begins to shift from tacit complicity with racial stigmatization to active resistance against it. Our goal in this project is to use Goffman’s concepts of “stigma” and “moral career” to explain Wideman’s growth, and in turn, add a degree of depth and breadth to Goffman’s notions of the “own” and the “wise” lacking in their original formulation