Latinx Revolutionary Horizons
Form and Futurity in the Americas

Renee Hudson (Author)

9781531507183

Hardback, published 7 May 2024

288 pages, 3 b/w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.59 kg

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 alongside 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.

Introduction: Forming Revolutions 1
PART I – LATINX REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS
1 Captive Revolutions: Revolutionary Consciousness as Racial
Consciousness in Ruiz de Burton and Cisneros 33
PART II – LATINX REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIES
2 Romancing Revolution: The Queer Future of National Romance
in Rizal, Rosca, and Hagedorn 69
3 Teaching Revolution: The Latinx Bildungsroman in Alvarez and Díaz 100
PART III – LATINX REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINARIES
4 Retconning Revolution: The Solidarity of Form in García, Barnet, and Avellaneda 133
5 Speculative Revolutions: Otrxs Latinidades in Delany and Silko 159
Coda: Is the X a Commons? 191
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 205
Bibliography 255
Index 281