Lorgia Garcia-Peña Book Talk

Date: TBD

This conference is open to the public. 

Lorgia Garcia-Peña’s new book, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, is a study of the impact of stories—historical and fictional—on the national and racial identity of a people. Offering the Dominican experience as case study, this book shows how the stories of a nation create marginality through acts of exclusion. These exclusionary acts are linked to the tensions between colonial desire and the aspiration for political independence. The book also shows how these official stories of exclusion, though influential in shaping a country’s identity, are always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through acts of resistance linked to the tensions between history—what is perceived as evidence of fact—and fiction—what is presumed to be invention: cultural productions, oral histories, and rumors.

Convener

Alejandro de la Fuente
Faculty Associate (on leave spring 2018); Chair, Weatherhead Initiative on Afro-Latin American Studies. Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin-American History and Economics, Department of History; Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center; Professor of African and African American Studies, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.

Co-Sponsors

Afro-Latin American Research Institute

See also: Conferences