Fall 2020 Franklin College Visiting Scholar Lorgia Garcia-Peña, Harvard University

Former UGA Assistant Professor and current Roy G. Clause Associate Professor at Harvard University, Dr. Garcia-Peña has gained national and international recognition for her outstanding and innovative research on Latinx in the USA and Latin American’s diaspora in the USA and Europe.

In her talk titled “Against Death: Afro-Dominican Feminist Counterdiscourse in the Diaspora,” Professor García-Peña will discuss her work on Afro-Dominican Feminist Counterdiscourse (see description below) via zoom as part of the Romance Languages Colloquium series. A Q&A session will follow. Professor Garcia-Peña has expressed interest in continuing the dialogue with graduate students after the general Q&A. The presentation will be open to all members of the UGA community.

https://zoom.us/j/96623843835#success

AGAINST DEATH: AFRO-DOMINICAN FEMINIST COUNTERDISCOUSE IN THE DIASPORA For working Black Dominicanas the path to a political representation, to equal rights and to liberation in their home country has been barred by centuries of institutionalized misogyny; by the persistence of coloniality and by the interconnecting dominance of a state-sponsored global capitalism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-immigrant bias. Women activists fighting against these interlocking forces, as in the case of Yolanda Guzmán, Sagrario Díaz and Mamá Tingó, are often silenced with death. In death, Dominican women become state-sanctioned symbols of resistance and hope. Yet, that symbolism does not translate into political empowerment and enfranchisement of Black women living. Rather, as we continue to see every day, feminicide and exclusion dominate life on the island as abroad for working Dominicanas. In this talk I explore some of the ways in which Dominicanas contradict death in the diaspora through kinship, community networks and political organizing. In their work and feminist praxis they both break the silence around the violence and repetition of Black Dominicanas’s death while also insisting on their right to life, to dignity, to belonging and to representation.