Lorgia García Peña - Community as Rebellion

PRAISE FOR COMMUNITY AS REBELLION

A lifesaving and life-affirming text, Community as Rebellion offers us the trenchant analysis and fearless strategy radical scholar-activists have long needed. But Lorgia Garca Peas 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, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Community as Rebellion is a must-read for anyone serious about confronting institutional racism, sexism, and elitism. Lorgia Garca Pea, one of her generations 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: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson

Lorgia Garca Pea 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 neofascist times! Cornel West, author of Race Matters

Unflinching, brilliant, and absolutely necessary. In these pages, Lorgia Garca Pea shares her experiences, and those of 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. Garca Pea 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. Garca Pea calls on us, as she writes, to mind the historical gaps for long-subjugated stories and 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, author of Year of the Dog

With characteristic clarity, courage, and conviction, Lorgia Garca Pea 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 of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Community as Rebellion is partly an incisive and deeply personal expos 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 Garca Pea 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

2022 Lorgia Garca Pea

Published in 2022 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-719-6

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email for more information.

Cover artwork from Fire by Teresita Fernndez.

Cover design by Rachel Cohen.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

To bell hooks, in memoriam

To the women of color whose backs have been my bridges

To my students, who made a home for me
in this barbed wire that is academia

CONTENTS

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

1.An open heart

2.A flexible mind

3.The desire to be part of the sum, rather than a single part

4.Patience

Recommended Aids

1.The company of friends

2.A warm beverage

3.A comfortable place to lie or sit

4.A sunny window

Further Reading

On Being Included, by Sara Ahmed

This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzalda and Cherre Moraga

Levente no. yolayorkdominicanyork, by Josefina Bez

Rethinking Radical Anti-Racist Feminist Politics in a Global Neoliberal Context, by Ochy Curiel, translated by Manuela Borzone and Alexander Ponomareff

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, by bell hooks

Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism, by Grada Kilomba

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde

Feminism without Borders, by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

PREFACE

My family says I was born rebellious. As a child I grew accustomed to hearing people describe me as malcriada (uncivil), always making trouble, always speaking up when I was supposed to stay quiet. One of my first weapons of rebellion was my hair. I grew up in a predominantly Afro-descendant culture in which girls were expected to straighten our hair with chemicals and hot combs or otherwise groom it tight into submission. Mothers would be judged by the state of their little girls hair. Therefore, all the little girls were socialized into the same ritual of making kinks and curls disappear to make ourselves beautiful. From a very early age I refused these rituals, kicking and screaming every time someone tried (to no avail) to tame my hair. As soon as my mom styled my hair into five perfect (and extremely tight) coils, I would pull them out, letting my kinks fly wild. The kids would yell at me: Pajona, grea! (Dominican slang terms to describe a girl with messy, unruly, bad hair). The nuns at my school would discipline me, warn me that the future for rebellious children was hell. The nice aunties at church would entice me with pretty ribbons, showing me pictures of white children looking pretty with their hair nicely tamed. Nothing worked.

In the 1970s Dominican Republic, having natural hair was akin to rebellion. Activist women who aligned with the socialist revolution would grow Afros or otherwise leave their kinks unconstrained. A common tactic of the repressive Joaqun Balaguer regime (19661978) was to round up women with Afros and throw them in jail or shave off their hair in front of a crowd to teach them a lesson. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s Dominican Republic, I was completely unaware of this violence; all I knew was I needed my hair to be free.