Latinx Revolutionary Horizons - by Renee Hudson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A necessary reconceptualization of Latinx identity, literature, and politics

In Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, Renee Hudson theorizes a liberatory latinidad that is not yet here and conceptualizes a hemispheric project in which contemporary Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution. Rather than viewing Latinx as solely a category of identification, she argues for an expansive, historicized sense of the term that illuminates its political potential.

Claiming the "x" in Latinx as marking the suspension and tension between how Latin American descended people identify and the future politics the "x" points us toward, Hudson contends that latinidad can signal a politics grounded in shared struggles and histories rather than merely a mode of identification. In this way, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons reads against current calls for cancelling latinidad based on its presumed anti-Black and anti-Indigenous framework. Instead, she examines the not-yet-here of latinidad to investigate the connection between the revolutionary history of the Americas and the creation of new genres in the hemisphere, from conversion narratives and dictator novels to neoslave narratives and testimonios.

By comparing colonialisms, she charts a revolutionary genealogy across a range of movements such as the Mexican Revolution, the Filipino People Power Revolution, resistance to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the Cuban Revolution. In pairing nineteenth-century authors along-side contemporary Latinx ones, Hudson examines a longer genealogy of Latinx resistance while expanding its literary canon, from the works of José Rizal and Martin Delany to those of Julia Alvarez, Jessica Hagedorn, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In imagining a truly transnational latinidad, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons thus rewrites our understanding of the nationalist formations that continue to characterize Latinx Studies.

Review Quotes

One of the true achievements of Latinx Revolutionary Horizons is its demonstration of just how far Latinx literary scholarship has come. . . Hudson builds on the work of these theorists of the Latinx experience to provide another horizon for Latinx literary scholarship--one in which the reader takes center stage, in which revolution is possible not only through the works we read but also through the act of reading itself.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

By reading contemporary Latinx literature with key 19th century texts of Latin American literature, Hudson demonstrates Latinx literature is continental in form as well as content, the consequence of layered conquests, racial ideologies, and imperialisms. The slave narrative, the testimonio, the dictator novel, guerilla conversion novels, all made significant contributions to the field of Latinx letters. Hudson moves beyond a New Historicism towards a theory of hemispheric aesthetics that are revolutionary precisely because they are place-based, and fractured by the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual realities the Spanish and British encountered upon their arrival in the 'new world.'---María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States

Richly textured with evocative and eloquent analyses, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons mobilizes an innovative and wide-ranging temporal and geographic archive to expand how we understand and imagine revolution in Latinx America and beyond.---Jennifer Harford Vargas, author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel

Thoroughly researched, and beautifully written, this book offers a convincing argument that Latinx revolutionary horizons work in counterintuitive, non-sequential, and non-linear ways across time and space. This is a powerful and thoughtful intervention into the field of Latinx Studies.---David J. Vázquez, author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity

About the Author

Renee Hudson is Assistant Professor of English at Chapman University.