Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective, by Lorgia García Peña

In Translating Blackness, Lorgia García Peña engages a rethinking of “blackness” so as to historicize “Black Latinidad in the context of global blackness and in relation to hegemonic blackness” (p. 5). The book offers a veritable manifesto on what it means to rigorously think alongside the challenges posed by Afropessimism—itself as a “contemporary intellectual tradition” (Ajari, “tradition intellectuelle contemporaine” in Noirceur: Race, genre, classe et pessimisme dans la pensée africaine-américaine aux XXIè siècle, 2022, p. 32)—but also as a highly politicized positioning in regards to “blackness.” What García Peña does is agilely think through the vexed ways “blackness” is read in three very different public spheres: North American Anglophone; Caribbean in-Spanish; and European in-Italian and in-Spanish.