Translating Blackness

“In questioning the centrality of US Blackness in the articulation of notions of Global Blackness in other diasporic contexts, this timely book makes groundbreaking contributions in Latino, Caribbean, and Africana studies, decolonial theory, and gender and performance studies.” - Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, author of Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context

“In Translating Blackness, Lorgia García Peña theorizes Black Latinidad in its unsettled meanings, translations, and significations as epistemology, method, and point of entry. In this profoundly hopeful and necessary book, García Peña continues to think with contradiction as a practice central to vaivén, the coming and going that informs the ways that Black people in Diaspora live belonging and unbelonging, practice resistance, and understand and make place outside of nation and in the face of migration and ongoing colonial violence.” - Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“García Peña offers a valuable contribution to the discussion of Blackness and citizenship, together with the inclusion of (female) migration …a welcome addition.”

"García Peña offers an innovative way of thinking about Latinidad and Blackness … Translating Blackness offers significant contributions to the field of Latina/o studies."

"García Peña pushes the reader to consider sites that lie outside the common migratory routes of Black Latinx individuals. Bringing together the fields of Black and Latinx studies, García Peña ... offers a transnational conceptualization of Black Latinidad that goes beyond its academic theorization in the U.S. context." - Shreya Parikh, Lateral

"An essential read for scholars in Latino and Black studies. . . .  Although its historical scope is wide ranging and its objects of study diverse, Translating Blackness persuasively demonstrates that transnationalism, rather than nationalism, is the more effective weapon for combatting the global pandemic of coloniality, antiimmigration, and antiblackness that plagues our modern world. - Trent Masiki, Modern Philology

“Employing a range of source material from historical archives to performances, literature to court cases, and bringing the reader to/through the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña traces a new epistemology. . . . She complicates the intersections of race, colonialism, immigration, and borders through nuanced examples.”

“Translating Blackness . . . [models] for us what scholarship grounded on our own humanity and ‘radical hope’ should look like.”

"The book offers a veritable manifesto on what it means to rigorously think alongside the challenges posed by Afropessimism." - Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, New West Indian Guide