In this exchange Urayoán Noel (NYU) and Rachel Afi Quinn (U. Houston) examine the innovative methods of Lorgia García Peña’s The Borders of Dominicanidad. Urayoán Noel highlights the methodology of entering the margins of U.S. and Dominican national archives, which he calls the “Lorgian Margin,” and Rachel Afi Quinn highlights the self-reflexivity of this methodology, pointing to the ways that Lorgia García Peña’s own voice and embodied experience come under self-scrutiny in the text.

Urayoán Noel | Begins:

Lorgia García Peña's The Borders of Dominicanidad (2016) dares us to engage with the "unread margins" (2) of US and Dominican national archives, in solidarity with "poor, black, marginal subjects who have been historically oppressed and exiled from the nation-state" (19). And yet, García Peña's book goes beyond the politics of representation and inclusion, embracing instead a poetics and politics of "contradiction" (italics in the original). While The Borders of Dominicanidad centers marginal bodies, its method involves urging us to linger at the margins, where "official stories of exclusion" are "always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through contradictions" (3). Such a poetics and politics leads us far beyond the national archive and even beyond the black counter-archive (as in Schomburg's "dust of digging") and into the palimpsestic dictions of a translocal and borderlands lowercase dominicanidad, against an uppercase Dominicanidad aligned with "hegemonic and official institutions of state control" ("Note on Terminology").

Mobilizing these marginal contradictions requires reading against the archival grain: for instance, by brilliantly analyzing a short story by "official" Dominican writer and politician Juan Bosch as part of "a conversation among Haitian, Dominican, and US American texts to analyze the rhetorical significance of the [Massacre of 1937] in shaping racial ideologies during the second half of the twentieth century" (17). It also involves recovering the repertoire of the (black, exiled) body as a site of knowledge production and critique, as in the theorization of the "Nié" ("taint") in performance artist Josefina Báez's radically experimental text Levente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork. (2011) as an embodied borderlands: a "transhistorical location where the stories of exclusion can be recovered and preserved" (4). Understanding Báez's imbricated textuality as "a diction that embodies and projects the very liminal experiences of the black Dominican and Dominicanyork subject the nation seeks to contain" (4), García Peña strategically and subtly theorizes with, from, and through Báez, a key figure in Dominican American literature and performance whose fiercely sui generis and challenging work remains critically underappreciated.

The fact that García Peña can toggle effortlessly and authoritatively between Bosch and Báez, between a Danticat novel and a Rita Indiana music video, between the nationalist writer Manuel Rueda and the isla abierta (open island) sensibility of the artist and performer David “Karmadavis” Pérez, and so on, is in itself a challenge to a series of disciplinary and disciplining turf logics: U.S.-centered Latinx studies versus Latin American studies; ethnic studies critique versus American studies historicism; the materiality of blackness versus the coalitional politics of latinidad; the repeating island versus the lettered city; nineteenth-century archival histories versus speculative futures; the literary canon versus expressive cultures., etc. How many scholars could rigorously and imaginatively inhabit such a range of contradictory discourses? Ultimately, then, The Borders of Dominicanidad models the very "rayano consciousness" it finds in a range of literary and cultural texts, in the spirit of "transnational, transtemporal interchange" that "produces new ways to theorize Latino/a studies, inciting fruitful dialogues that can help us rethink how power and politics interact with the production of symbolic and geographic borders that shape our understanding of race, nation, and culture" (18). Thus, although it is groundbreaking and revelatory purely as "a study of the palimpsestic coexistence of colonial impositions that are projected on the racialized subjects living on the island or the United States" (10-11), The Borders of Dominicanidad matters just as much for its palimpsestic border method, which leaves traces of the nation visible only to magnify the margin. In mapping how "black Dominican migrants are exiles at home and abroad" (2), García Peña challenges the geographies and temporalities not just of institutional Dominicanidad and Latinidad, but of keywords such as "border" and "diaspora" as they structure Latinx studies and cultural studies more generally.

In a sense, then, the most relevant comparison here is not to foundational transnational Dominicanists such as Silvio Torres-Saillant but to Gloria Anzaldúa: both García Peña and Anzaldúa aim for an autological poetics/politics that embodies what it theorizes, that embraces the contradictory knowledges of the body, and that reclaims the philosophical and poetic potential of metaphor (from Nié to rayano): never pat, always generative. Given that the book's introduction is framed as a response to a highly inappropriate professor (“Ah, dominicana! I love your country!”.…), The Borders of Dominicanidad also functions as an extended "autohistoria-teoría," Anzaldúa's term for a personal history that theorizes at the personal and social level. The fact that this autohistoria-teoría tells a story of personal and social struggle in an academic space shaped by the violence of "the professor's diction" (1) underscores the crucial stakes of García Peña's project of "contradiction," and it takes on utterly vertiginous dimensions in the context of her tenure denial. When confronted with the violence of their own diction, the institution doubles down and the guard must crack down. But, fortunately for us, the margins keep multiplying, as part of the ongoing "project of recovering and historicizing knowledge interruptions" (1). Amid "abysmal inequalities" (3), we nonetheless magnify our shared stories, even from our lone, quotidian particularity (to paraphrase Báez's Levente).

If we follow Derrida, Whitehead's notion of philosophy as footnotes to Plato gives way to a philosophy in, of, and for the margins. Similarly, if we follow García Peña and take seriously the bodies that are footnotes to the nation and its histories, we end up not with a rehabilitated national narrative of tidy liberal inclusion, but with an un-easy yet necessary awareness of our own location in contested space. This is the space I call the Lorgian margin. You can keep the nation and its diminishing marginal returns (marginalia de la nación y su alias).

I'm down with LGP! Gracias, Lorgia García Peña, for the contradictions.

Rachel Afi Quinn | Responds:

Lorgia García Peña’s interdisciplinary first book The Borders of Dominicanidad (2016) offers a transhistorical cultural studies approach to Dominican identity, providing us with essential language through which to comprehend the complexities of Dominicanidad—formed on the island and in the diaspora. Just as she immediately acknowledges that “The intellectual legacy of Juan Bosch served as a bridge between the often slippery here and there my book connects” (xi), I want to acknowledge that García Peña’s theoretical contributions in Borders of Dominicanidad do essential bridge-building in the field of Dominican studies, informing the direction the field is headed. Through a critical intervention into how we imagine Dominican national identity and its relationship to blackness, García Peña names for us the ways that “silences and repetitions operate in the erasure of racialized Dominican subjects from the nation and its archive” (1). In a text that is rich with gems of critical analysis, she brings essential voices—including her own—from the margin to the center. And, by exposing us from page one to the ways in which her own body as a Dominican woman serves as a site onto which a colonial narrative is projected, she sets us on edge in order to make clear the different stakes for brown and black bodies wanting to produce knowledge within the academy.

In response to Urayoán Noel, I want to reflect on the experience of being in constant exile because of race and nation, something that García Peña’s work names, at a site at which “poetics and politics” emerge. What does this mean for so many of us who hold the border within? The idea of a “Lorgian margin” ought to articulate what is at stake in knowledge production by women of color who find themselves required to theorize “from the flesh” (5).

As García Peña writes, “El Nié signifies not the border space that the subject inhabits—Anzaldúa’s the barbwire—but rather the body that carries the violent borders that deter them from entering the nation, from access to full citizenship and from public, cultural, historical and political representation” (4). And throughout this text she necessarily theorizes her own embodied experience as a Dominican woman, as she navigates the nuances and contradictions of Dominican identity across numerous intersecting and competing narratives. As an “embodiment of past through present knowledge,” El Nié does the work of bridging the diaspora and state-produced borders through the body, while the Dominican body itself reveals “national exclusion (borders) across history and generations” (5). Nevertheless, because “skepticism surrounds intellectual projects that are not solely evidence based,” García Peña demands of us a new form of reading in order to locate “a more complete version of ‘the truth’” (5).

I value García Peña’s astute practice of “autohistoria-teoría” in part because she names for readers the ways that her own subjectivity might just as readily produce the limitations of her analysis of race. For example, she offers self-interrogation as a primary method for a cultural studies analysis of Rita Indiana Hernández’s mulata Madonna in the music video “Da pa lo do” (2011). García Peña writes:

Though I am a light-skinned Dominican like Hernández, my encounter with US racism, particularly outside the urban area in which I grew up, led me to identify as black. Still, I am aware—and often reminded—of the fact that in the Dominican Republic, my light complexion and my acquired middle class make me a racially privileged Dominican. My own racial contradictions, combined with my engagement in the US race/ethnicity struggles, provoked a discursive dead end in my analysis (161).

Listening to her own visceral response to the image of Hernández allowed García Peña “to confront my own contradictions, an exercise that brought me closer to a new pedagogical and investigative approach: one in which the specificity of the experience being examined superseded my own ontological bias” (161). Hernández’s cultural production, in which she darkened her skin to perform the Madonna, but also to invoke the Vodou lwa Ezili, could be read as a “counterhegemonic action in the context of Dominican national ideology and cultural dominance” (165). Ultimately, this self-reflective process of reading and re-reading reveals how García Peña has arrived at critical insights regarding the inconvenient “truths” about the ways that Dominicans’ complex experiences of blackness in the U.S and on the island become marginalized.

The “Lorgian margin,” which Noel proposes would leave us with an “un-easy yet necessary awareness of our own location in contested space,” also suggests sitting with the contradiction of being both within and outside of privilege with an understanding of how both are central to one’s world view even if they contradict one another. By devising the concept of contradiction (with her own emphasis on “diction” as language that produces subjectivity), García Peña has been able to demonstrate the ways that “narratives produce nations through the violence, exclusion, and the continuous control of racialized bodies” (13). She has engaged transnational feminist scholars of color such as M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty in naming institutional efforts to marginalize the embodied knowledge that we produce, that which inherently provides us powerful insights about the workings of racialized and gendered constructions of power. Meanwhile, her own experiences of marginalization in the academy, violences of erasure, policing, hate, and dismissal, remind us that power works in precisely these ways, particularly through tactics of exclusion. Nevertheless, it is within the academy that García Peña has been able to shape the field of Dominican studies, holding each of us in this field to a higher standard in our work, of both intellectual rigor and generosity. This is her practice, and it becomes evident in how readily we seek to publicly engage with her intellectual contributions.

Thankfully, García Peña’s work pushes back against colonial power structures with great clarity of vision, questioning who produces knowledge, from where, and for whom. Thankfully she has produced work that questions the official narrative and examines “how ‘truths’ contribute to the violence, silencing and erasure of racialized people and their truths” (13). Is there any other way to respond to ongoing acts of violence? One of the contradictions we are left to wrestle with is the attempt to marginalize the intellectual contributions of García Peña whose work so many of us rely on as bridge.