City Lights together with The MIT Press present
Autotheory: Encounters, Embodiments, Critique
Moderated by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan with Laura Cernat, Chris Kraus, Erica Richardson, and Elda María Román
Join us for day long inquiry exploring the literary and artistic practice that combines autobiography and critical theory. Autotheory 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. Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan underscore autotheory’s multiple genealogies and genre-bending forms while situating it within the contemporary political field. 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).
Free to the public. One zoom link admits you to all sessions. You must register to attend.
The Agenda:
Session One – 11:00 am Pacific Time/ 2:00 pm Eastern Time
Two Critics in Search of a Form – with Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan – What is autotheory, where did it come from, and how did it find us? Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan discuss their new edited volume Autotheories and introduce the critical form of the moment.
Session Two – 12:15 pm Pacific Time / 3:15 pm Eastern Time
Autotheories: Then and Now – with Alex Brostoff, Vilashini Cooppan. and Laura Cernat – How did autotheory emerge and in what critical and historical debates is it rooted? With invited guests, we discuss how the self is produced in writing, how language fleshes us, and what selves, texts, and worlds emerge.
Session Three – 1:30 pm Pacific Time / 4:30 pm Eastern Time
Politics, Communities, Solidarities – moderated by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan with Erica Richardson and Elda María Román – What communities have given rise to autotheory’s voices and what are its preoccupations and politics? With invited guests, this session introduces autotheory’s roots in BIPOC, crip, neurodivergent, feminist, queer, and trans writing.
Session Four – 2:45 pm Pacific / 5:45 pm Eastern
Making Autotheories: Presses, Publishers, Popularization – Moderated by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan with a special prerecorded interview with Chris Kraus – Presses, Publishers, Popularization: What is the relationship between autotheory’s experimental forms and the publishing industry? Autotheory has been a form for renegades; has its recent popularization dulled its critical edge?
This event celebrates the publication of the new anthology
Autotheories
Edited by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan
Published by The MIT Press
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
About the participants:
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, their work converges at the crossroads of literary and critical theory and trans and queer cultural production in modern and contemporary hemispheric American studies. Their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. They are also the co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract), as well as a special issue of ASAP/Journal on autotheory (2021). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in 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.
Laura Cernat is an FWO (Flemish Research Foundation) postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium. She has contributed to the volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (2017), Theory in the “Post” Era (2021), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2022), Reading the Contemporary Author (2023), From Shakespeare to Autofiction (2024), and Experimental Life Writing Today (forthcoming, 2025), has published in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Partial Answers, and African American Review, has guest-edited a special issue on autofiction and autotheory in 2022 and co-edited a special issue on Eastern European Women’s Life Writing in 2023, as well as the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Biofiction (2025). Laura has presented at over twenty international conferences, including several editions of the ACLA and IABA, and was in the organizing committee of four conferences and several panels and roundtables. She was the main organizer of the hybrid bilingual conference Biofiction as World Literature (Leuven, 2021).
Chris Kraus is a writer, critic, editor, filmmaker, performance artist, and educator. Her work includes the novels I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, and Torpor, which form a loose trilogy that navigates between autobiography, fiction, philosophy, and art criticism. Kraus has also produced plays and films, including the feature film Gravity & Grace. Her work has featured in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Afterall, The New Yorker, The New York Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and Texte zur Kunst. She taught creative writing and art writing at The European Graduate School/EGS for ten years and has been Writer in Residence at ArtCenter College of Design. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for General Non-Fiction (2016), a Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant (2011), and Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association (2008). Chris Kraus is co-editor of the publishing house Semiotext(e).
Erica Richardson is a Black feminist scholar and Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2018. Her research focuses on Black women’s literature, Black intel- lectual history, and African American drama. She has published work in the American Studies Journal. She received fellowships from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars in 2021–2022 and the Schomburg Center for Re- search on Black Culture in 2022–2023 to complete research for her book manuscript, How Black Women Count: Black Womanhood, Literary Culture, and Black Social Life, which explores the expression and thought of Black women as they strive to calculate and account for Black life while reckon- ing with antiblackness in the United States.
Elda María Román is an Associate Professor of English at USC Dornsife and studies race, class, literature, and media. She is the author of “Race and Upward Mobility,” which examines class dynamics in African American and Mexican American literature, television, and film from the 1940s-2000s. Dr. Román has been awarded the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Qualifying Exams” and is a Pushcart nominee for her her nonfiction piece in the prose category “House of Silences.”
This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation