Community as Rebellion: Women of Color, Academia, and the Fight for Ethnic Studies

A meditation on freedom making in the academy for women scholars of color.

offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia Garca Pea 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.

Garca Pea argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls \”teaching in freedom\”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

Review Quotes:

\”A life-saving and life-affirming text, Community as Rebellion offers us the trenchant analysis and fearless strategy radical scholar-activists have long needed. But Lorgia Garcíiacute;a Peñntilde;a’s 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, author of Freedom is a Constant Struggle

\” Community as Rebellion is a must read for anyone serious about confronting institutional racism, sexism, and elitism. Lorgia García Peña, one of her generation’s 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

\”Lorgia García Peña 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 neo-fascist times!\”
–Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary

\”Some key words that I think of when I think of Lorgia García Peña and her work: brilliant, courageous, loving, stubborn, ferocious, truth-teller. Community as Rebellion combines piercing diagnosis with an invitation to think about how we organize resistance and mobilize communities…. Generative and powerful.\”
–Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University

\”Unflinching, brilliant, and absolutely necessary. In these pages, Lorgia García Peña shares her experiences–and 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

Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
Imprint: HAYMARKET US
Publication date: 31/05/2022