Alison Hsiao
Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies Loyola Marymount University
- Los Angeles CA
Biography
Professor Hsiao conducts research across law, literature, and visual arts to highlight patterns in US legal discourse and language which disavow the lived experience of racialized communities. Their developing book project, "Missing Persons: Reading Racialized Disappearance in Law & literature," explores relational geographies of loss emerging from U.S. developmental law which envelop racialized communities in atmospheres of anticipatory violence. Conceptualizing the radical potential of grief, "Missing Persons" examines cultural productions to imagine redress outside of state apparatuses and honor the work communities have already done to make this world more livable.
Education
University of California, Davis
Ph.D.
English, D.E. Native American Studies
Tufts University
M.A.
English
Willamette University
B.A.
English/Music
Areas of Expertise
Languages
- Mandarin
- English
Courses
WGST 1100
Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Contemporary Society
Articles
Haunting Black Feminist Geographies in Pudd’nhead Wilson
Arizona QuarterlyAlison Hsiao
2022-04-01
Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson depicts a passing plot centered on Roxy, a white passing enslaved woman who switches her master’s son with her own. Through the passing plot, the Gothic seeps in to unsettle the slaveholding town of Dawson’s Landing. In this essay, I focus on the novel’s racialized geographies through the haunted house which paradoxically represents Roxy’s oppression as well as facilitates her survival and motherhood by allowing her to remap dominant, white supremacist geographies. While the novel initially centers on domestic houses and the courtroom, the reader becomes drawn to the haunted house. I draw from Black feminist scholarship to argue that the haunted house emerges as the Middle Passage, enabling Roxy and Tom to subvert the logics of the white domestic and insist upon their own desires. To that end the haunted house elucidates the racial and gendered cartography of the novel and Roxy’s agential possibilities.
