Dr. Renee Hudson in Residence August 2024
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Renee Hudson will be in-residence during August 2024 with the Speculative Play and Just Futurities program.
While in residence in Indianapolis, Dr. Hudson will work on her latest project, “Hegemonic Citizenship” a chapter in her upcoming book Latinx Girlhood and the Problem of Citizenship. Focusing on Latinx girls across a wide range of cultural productions underscores how issues of gender and sexuality undergird broader discourses surrounding citizenship and democracy.
About Dr. Renee Hudson
Dr. Renee Hudson (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor and Director of Latinx & Latin American Studies at Chapman University. She specializes in hemispheric studies, multiethnic literature, speculative fiction, genre studies, and histories of revolution and resistance. She has published in Modern Fiction Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, and has forthcoming pieces in The Cambridge Companion on Race and Literature and Latinx Literature in Transition Vol. 2, also with Cambridge. She edited a cluster on Latinx speculative fiction for ASAP/J, and her book reviews can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, MELUS, and ASAP/J.
Her first book, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas, from Fordham University Press (2024) examines how contemporary Latinx literature illustrates the hemispheric convergence of Latin American independence movements and the long history of US occupations and interventions.
In "Hegemonic Citizenship," Dr. Hudson examines the first girl to appear in Latinx literature: María Dolores Medina (Lola) in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s “Who Would Have Thought It?” (1872, republished in 1995). Lola’s appearance sets the stage for the problems of citizenship that Dr. Hudson argues governs Latinx girlhood, particularly in terms of nationality and assimilation.
Dr. Hudson attends to how the first Latina girl represents the Latinx possessive investment in whiteness that attends the disavowal of both Black and Indigenous heritage. Dr. Hudson then extend this logic into Alexandra Villasante’s 2019 young adult novel, “The Grief Keeper,” where the protagonist Marisol bears whiteness (not witness) as her pathway to citizenship. In this way, “The Grief Keeper” participates in the white savior paradigm and illuminates how young adult fiction is not inherently progressive.