Autotheories

A transdisciplinary array of authors offering a new frame of reference for autotheory and its genre-bending synthesis of autobiography and critical theory.


Autotheories tells the story of a field in formation. Building on traditions that have long fused life writing, philosophical encounter, embodied theorizing, and cultural critique, autotheory issues new practices of critical theory. Transgressing generic boundaries and bridging stylistic registers, it crafts language that is intimate, analytic, playful, and insurgent. Editors Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan underscore autotheory’s multiple genealogies and genre-bending forms while situating it against the contemporary political field. In this collection, autotheory emerges as a strut (of style), a straddle (of disciplines), a proliferation (of selves), an axis (of identifications), an index (of attachments), and an archive (of loves).

Contributors to this book investigate the field’s emergent archive of cultural objects, its critical-creative praxis, and the subsequent reconfiguration of the subject in theory. This volume summons an “auto” that is not the self alone but one yoked to other selves and structures, articulated through the language of theory, declared through desire. Chapters stage encounters among autoethnography, autofiction, and creative nonfiction, social movements, BIPOC feminisms, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, trans and queer studies, disability studies, and new media studies. An assemblage and an experience, Autotheories surveys the field’s iterations and permutations.

Without settling for classification or bowing to ossification, Autotheories invites you to its discursive play.

Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they are the coeditor of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on autotheory.
Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing.