The English Department is pleased to announce a lecture by Renee Hudson of UCLA, "Invented Filiations: Junot Díaz's Revolutionary Bildungsroman," Monday, February 16, at 5:00 pm in 100-104 McKenna Hall. A reception will follow.
Renee Hudson is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, "Revolutionary Futures: Romance and the Limits of Transnational Forms, 1910-1986," examines the revolutionary unconscious of American literature by exploring how genre depicts revolution and thereby mediates the production of new national imaginaries. Through readings of a range of authors, including Richard Wright, Cormac McCarthy, Junot Díaz, and Jessica Hagedorn, Hudson's project contends that failures of romance, which defy genre expectations, create new kinship structures and, in so doing, new political futures. By drawing upon literary criticism, critical race theory, and queer studies, her project reshapes how transnationalism and hemispheric studies conceptualize American literature by demonstrating how texts informed by the history of Spanish colonization and American intervention share political and narrative histories.