New Books in Critical Theory Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan eds., "Autotheories" (MIT Press, 2025)
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Mar 6, 2026 Vilashini Cooppan, UCSC literature professor exploring postcolonial memory and affect. Alex Brostoff, Georgetown scholar of transnational queer and autotheory studies. They map autotheory's hybrid blend of life writing and critical theory. They discuss plural genealogies, editing experimental writing, and autotheory’s political and reading practices.
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Autotheory Is Defined By Operations Not Rules
- Autotheory resists a single definition and is best understood through its operations like pluralizing forms, citationality, and hybridizing memoir with theory.
- Vilashini Cooppan emphasizes a plural self as processual, assembled from diaries, archives, psychogeography, and dense intertextual reference.
Focus On What Autotheory Does Not What It Is
- The editors prioritized asking what autotheory does rather than what it is, shifting focus from canonizing to practice and political effect.
- Alex Brostoff explains the book frames autotheory as doing — becoming, operation, and performativity that produce social and relational change.
Pandemic Submissions Sparked The Book
- The volume emerged from a pandemic-era ASAP Journal special issue that received three times the usual submissions, prompting a fuller edited book.
- Alex Brostoff recounts reading Vilashini Cooppan's piece and contacting her, which led to five years of remote collaboration and the book's creation.
