The Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF), in partnership with Seattle Arts and Lectures, invites you to a virtual book club event! Tune in virtually on July 13 at Noon PST for a conversation with MCF President and CEO Carmen Rojas, PhD, author Lorgia García-Peña, PhD, and Freedom Scholar and Political Strategist Charlene Carruthers, MSW, as they discuss Lorgia's book Community as Rebellion.
This event is part of our MCF Book Club: Reading for a Liberated Future series. The MCF Book Club shares the ideas of leaders who encourage us to imagine how we can radically transform our democracy, economy, and society.
Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.
Lorgia García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University’s Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora where she focuses on Latinx studies, global Blackness, and Dominican diaspora studies.
She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations, and Archives of Contradictions, which reveals, through the Dominican experience, how marginality is created through acts of exclusion. The Borders of Dominicanidad has won multiple awards, including the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies. Peña is currently working on an ongoing book-length project titled Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives.
Charlene A. Carruthers is a political strategist, cultural worker and Ph.D. student in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her research includes Black feminist political economies, abolition of patriarchal and carceral systems, and the role of cultural work within the Black Radical Tradition.
Her work spans more than 15 years of community organizing across racial, gender and economic justice movements. She is the author of the book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
