Retconning Revolution and the Solidarity of Form

Drawing from her book, 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, Hudson 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 and pairing nineteenth-century authors along­side contemporary Latinx ones, she examines a longer genealogy of Latinx resistance while expanding its literary canon. Latinx Revolutionary Horizons thus imagines a truly transnational latinidad and rewrites our understanding of the nationalist formations that continue to characterize Latinx Studies.