Autotheories
Edited by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan
Published by The MIT Press
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 constructs 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 within 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).
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.
Contributors include: Alex Brostoff, Jessica Bush, Judith Butler, Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Jan Grue, Emma Lieber, Megan Moodie, Lili Owen Rowlands, John Patterson, Paul B. Preciado, Erica Richardson, Migueltzinta C. Solís, Jamieson Webster, Damon Ross Young, Stacey Young, Arianne Zwartjes.
The book launch will take place in a hybrid format, with attendance both in-person and online (via Zoom Webinar). The launch will be followed by a drinks reception.
This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and to avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee everyone a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis.
Accessibility:
For in-person attendees, this event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location
The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact iash@ed.ac.uk as soon as possible.
Biographies:
Alex Brostoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and incoming Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, their work converges at the crossroads of trans and queer cultural production and decolonial critique across twentieth and twenty-first century hemispheric American studies. Their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. They are the co-editor of two volumes: Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract) and Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025). They have also guest edited “Autotheory,” a special issue of ASAP/Journal (2021) and “Trans Literatures,” a special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies (forthcoming, 2025). They have translated a range of works from Spanish and Portuguese, including books by Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak. Their scholarship and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Diacritics, Representations, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on comparative and world literature, postcolonial studies, memory studies, the theory of the novel, critical theory, biofiction, and autotheory. Her work appears in the journals symploke, Gramma: A Journal of Theory, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Culture, PMLA, Concentric, Qui Parle, Critical Times, ASAP Journal, as well as in the edited volumes, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, The MLA Guide to Teaching World Literature, the Routledge Companion to World Literature, Approaches to Teaching World Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, The Handbook of Anglophone World Literature, The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, and The Routledge Companion to Biofiction.
Register on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-autotheories-tickets-1353222999419?aff=oddtdtcreator