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- [00:01]
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- [00:28]
Alex Brostov
Ugh.
- [00:29]
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- [00:33]
Velashni Kupan
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Velashni Kupan
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- [00:59]
Alex Brostov
I was groomed to become one of
- [01:01]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
his wives this week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [01:11]
Alex Brostov
I want to see action and I am demanding action.
- [01:15]
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- [01:17]
Alex Brostov
need to start walking the walk now.
- [01:18]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
- [01:29]
Alex Brostov
Welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:34]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
welcome to New Books Network. My name is Matt Schickerfer. I'm a scholar of literary theory with focus on semiology and form and the intersection of art, prose and the theoretical thought. Today I'm joined by Alex Brostov and Vilashni Kupan to discuss their co edited volume AutoFueries, published last year, 2025 by MIT Press. This work brings together text on auto theory written by Emma Lieber, Jessica Bush, Sean Patterson, Jan gru, Mag Moody, R.L. goldberg, Carla Ficero, Stacy Young, Erika Richardson, Ariane Svartius, Lilian Rowlands, Miguel Sintha Sisolis, Damon Ross Young, Jamison Webster, Judith Butler, and Paul Preciado. Alex Prostoff is Assistant professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University where they are affiliated faculty in Global and Comparative Literature and the center of Latin American Studies. Their first book, Critical Reframing of Auto Theory, is under advanced contract with Columbia University Press. They are co editor of Auto Theories and have also guest edited special issues of ASAP Journal on auto theory in 2021 and college literature on trans literatures last year 25, where scholarship and translation have appeared or are forthcoming in Diacritics, Representations, tsq, Critical Times, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere. Elashni Coupon is professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her articles and essays on comparative and word literature, postcolonial studies, memory studies, and affect theory and gender theory have appeared in some Grammar, Journal of Theory, Comparative Literature Studies, Public Culture, pmla, Concentric Kripal, and Critical Times, as well as in the edited volumes Lost Politicals of Mourning, Postcolonial Studies, and Beyond Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, the MLA Guide to Teaching Word Literature, the Rotleg Companion to World Literature, Approaches to Teaching World Literature, the Cambridge Companion to the Novel, the Handbook of Anglophone World Literature, and the Cambridge Companion to World Literature. She's the author of Worlds, National Narratives, and Global Connections in Post Criminal Writing, published by Stanford University Press, 2009. Maybe to start us off, why wouldn't you introduce yourself quickly with like, what's your field of study and what's your like, independent of the book we talk about your general question or questions which you work on?
- [04:21]
Velashni Kupan
Well, I am in literature and I was in comparative literature, so I think with that field as well as world literature, and have been for a long time interested in the practices of intertextuality as a mark of anti and decolonial and postcolonial writing, and also about literary circulations as one mode of how we understand the theory of world literature. And so that question has carried over into some of the things that draw me to auto theory, if we understand it as a practice very much constituted, but not exclusively by citationality, intertextuality, a certain kind of referential web. I am a product of 1980s French theory, and in real time that was when I was in college and in graduate school. And so that too is something that I bring very much to some of the questions I'm interested in. In auto theory. That was also, of course, the exact decade of women of color feminism, of the emergence and kind of consolidation of postcolonial theory. So I think that those are some of the questions that I've brought to it. Over the years I've done more work with gender theory, and that too has been something whose many threads I see in auto theory. As a regionalist, I work in the Indian Ocean field. I'm actually interested in how voices that are personal have been so central to telling the histories of slavery and indenture. And there are, you know, many, many Examples of that across. But I also work on European materials as well.
- [06:29]
Alex Brostov
Hi everyone, I'm Alex Brostov. I use they them, pronouns. And I'll just pick up from kind of where Velashny left off. We're both trained as comparatists originally. I have a kind of different regional focus than Velashny does, in the sense that I'm a hemispheric Americanist working predominantly in 20th and 21st century trans and queer literatures, but with a similar set of kind of theoretical interests, dare I say fixations or obsessions, as Velashini mentioned in my work and in my monograph that I'm. That, you know, was conceived of alongside the Auto Theories volume, I'm really interested in offering a critical reframing of auto theory, thinking about not just the ways in which the auto is always already relational, which is part of the intervention the volume makes, but in my own work I'm thinking about the transnational encounters between trans and queer self figuration and decolonial critique from a hemispheric American context, or within a hemispheric American context. I'm also a practicing translator. I translate predominantly from Brazilian Portuguese, but also from Spanish. And translation studies, both in terms of theory and practice, plays a major role in the way I'm thinking about auto theory not just as a Euro American innovation, but a form that actually originates in the Global South. So my monograph seeks to intervene in where auto theory is coming from and to re situate it alongside analogous practices that are thinking about the relationship between trans and queer self figuration and the call for collectivization, coalition building and transnational feminisms.
- [08:32]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Right, so you already mentioned the intervention of the volume. And to navigate to that question, I would like to start with the central term, which also is the title, and especially the title being the plural. So we're not only talking about auto theory, but about auto theories. And I think an interesting question towards this term and terms is always like, how do we start thinking about it? And also what shifts through the process of writing the volume, of editing the volume. Where do we see auto theory now? How would we define it? Like a before and after in general, how would you? Especially also for listeners who are maybe not so familiar with this very specific literary concept, which on the one hand describes like an idea of genre, but also the discourse itself around this genre, introduce it?
- [09:30]
Velashni Kupan
Yeah, sure.
- [09:31]
Alex Brostov
I mean, this is like the million dollar question we get asked first every time, what is Auto theory? So maybe we can start by offering a working definition, which is what we do in the Introduction to the volume and. And then, you know, we'll deconstruct it as the volume does.
- [09:48]
Velashni Kupan
Right.
- [09:49]
Alex Brostov
You know, as a burgeoning field, studies of auto theory have looked at it as a genre and as a practice and as a method, and it's usually understood as a hybrid one, one that brings together practices of creative nonfiction, life writing and autobiography with critical theory, philosophy, etc. Is Velashni. Do you want to, for us, like to get started?
- [10:17]
Velashni Kupan
Is that we should add beginning and. Yes. I mean, this is a form. You talked about it, Mathis, as both a genre and then a discourse around a genre. And it's actually a genre that shatters itself. It's a genre that refuses its own definition. It's a genre that we both love. Derrida's law of genre that precisely asks us to see the undoing of that category. So it's a hard thing to define specifically, but one can index its operations, right? And I would say that some of those operations are about plurality, the pluralization of forms and their hybridization. So all of the things Alex has mentioned, but also memoir, diary, dream journal, curling scraps of the archival self, a kind of psychogeography, I think, very much about the kinds of social spaces that are so present in so much of the texts we think of as auto theoretical. Which also cuts against perhaps the first assumption, or even the critique of auto theory, is that it's simply the self writ large. It's simply a kind of hyper magnification of a narrating eye that filters all of this experience. Not for nothing has it been called navel gazing. But in terms of those who see this critique as a kind of aggrandization of the self. But our volume, and I think our reading of auto theory, is really committed to the theoretical discourses that enjoin us to see the self as plural, as always plural, as caught up in pluralities, as making pluralities. And by that we mean the self is a processual practice, right? Something that is itself like auto theoretical texts, an assemblage, a citational, iterative composition in which we see a kind of density of. I guess I want to say reference, right? So that's a plural self. It's also true that the kinds of connections that auto theory makes, or we might even call it the relations that auto theory makes, are about pluralizing. And in the volume, we play on the double meaning of relating, both the act of telling, of recounting, and also the tethering, connecting, connectivity of those two. So I think those are ways in which both the provisional genre and the subject. So the theory and the auto can be understood as undergoing similar operations. That doesn't mean they're in a mirror relationship. But that's one place we started because we didn't want it necessarily to be a story of an individual in search of a theory, right?
- [13:51]
Alex Brostov
So this is why it's so important. It was so important to us to have the plural in the title. So, you know, perhaps the one word title, Auto Theories may sound audacious in the sense that it is a one word title, but we really wanted to underscore that Auto Theory is not a monolith, right? Its iterations proliferate, its genealogies and its pedagogies bifurcate, its efficacy fluctuates. It's not just one thing. And I guess just to kind of, you know, summarize what Velashny was saying as a title, Auto Theories kind of aims to underscore the plurality of both the burgeoning field and the self that is in part its subject. However, this is a self that is, you know, destabilized and made plural from the very discourses that it's drawing from and those discourses. And, you know, this is apparent, I think, even from the way the table of contents is being jigsawed. You know, the discourses that Auto Theory is drawing from represent encounters between, on the one hand, post structuralism's, you know, long investigation of the self both in and as language, and then that interlocking tradition of bipoc and crip and working class and feminist queer trans writers thinking about the structural conditions that produce a self that tethering to go back to Veloshny's term. So we wanted to kind of braid together both of these genealogies, thinking about what happens when historically marginalized frameworks and subjects encounter theoretical traditions that have been so long associated with questions of self reflexivity.
- [15:50]
Velashni Kupan
And that too is a plural act, right? To take the individual theorist, that kind of hero of a certain kind of genealogical literary history, and instead situate the theoretical subject really in a kind of community, often in a tradition, but not a singular one. All the descriptions you've given of the places we see auto theory at work for a very long time are affiliative and collaborative and coalitional kind of projects, right? And I think that makes a real difference for from the sort of sense of a post structuralist subject in search of its theory, where theory becomes the kind of apotheosis of this already constituted knower, I think Auto Theory is Much more for us about a doing. You know, it's precessual. We might think of it as becoming, we might think of it as operation, we might think of it as performativity.
- [17:05]
Alex Brostov
Yeah, I was just. I'm teaching an auto theory class right now. Well, it's called auto theories, plural. And I always, you know, I've been saying to my undergrads, it's actually not so interesting for us to be each week asking what is it? Because the question of what it is is always is a question that's gonna, you know, that lead us toward acts of canonizing, periodizing, taxonomizing, and I think what our volume and what the syllabus for my class does is ask what auto theory does right. This old move from being to doing right and back again. So what does auto theory do socially? What does it do politically? What does it do relationally?
- [17:46]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Thank you.
- [17:47]
Velashni Kupan
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax. And let go of whatever you're carrying
- [17:53]
Alex Brostov
today while I'm letting you. Letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
- [18:01]
Velashni Kupan
Oh, my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry.
- [18:04]
Alex Brostov
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry.
- [18:10]
Velashni Kupan
Namaste.
- [18:11]
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- [18:44]
Velashni Kupan
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- [19:17]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Yeah, I think that especially the last point about not so much asking what it is, but what it does, also relates a lot to our shared question of what criticism is, especially in literary studies. It's not so much about figuring actually out how we can define it, but more how we work with it and where it is productive and how we use it. I would like to stay with this notion of the plurality, and you coined it like the jigsaw or table of content. So this is a volume which is not as common to discuss here on New Books Network, since you usually do monographs. But I think here it is really interesting because the form also reflects the topics of discourse, the plurality of voices, the multiple genealogies as well. And also just offering different types on how to write text, how to write an essay. And I would like to ask, like, how did you start with this project? What were, like, the questions you were trying to answer? And also how to really decide on positions you would like to have in this volume. How to approach the big question at
- [20:35]
Velashni Kupan
the start of this project, Alex, was it doing this long before I arrived? So.
- [20:41]
Alex Brostov
Well, I guess there are kind of two interwoven stories that we can tell. And I mean, to tell the story of this volume, we actually have to start with the story of ASAP Journal. So I co edited a special issue of ASAP Journal with Loren Fournier on Auto Theory. And that was largely during the pandemic. And when we sent out our call for papers, we actually got three times more submissions than the Journal had ever received so far, far more than we would have been able to include in a special issue. So we started conceiving of the volume simultaneously. And Velashiny's article, Velashiny has a piece that is in the original ASAP issue called Skin can kind iue Auto Theory's compositional grammars. And when I read that piece, I had what we ultimately call in the volume, like one of Auto Theory's primal scenes. So, you know, in the introduction to Autotheries, we describe Auto Theory's primal scene as being something like, I read X and I realized I could write differently. And this is part of Auto Theory's compositional grammar. It conjugates. And so I read Velashny's piece, and I was like, this is what I want to do. This is the kind of writing and theorizing and thinking that I want to contribute to a scholarly community. So I wrote to her and we zoomed.
- [22:16]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
And
- [22:18]
Alex Brostov
five years later, this volume appeared on the scene. But, you know, a lot of things happened within the middle, you know, it's a rapidly growing and changing field. And, you know, we jigsawed the table of contents many, many times to reflect some of the transformations that we were witnessing within the field. So, for example, we really. I think there's a kind of alternate version of this volume that's organized by markers of difference, markers of identity. But instead of organizing the table of contents by markers of difference, we wanted to organize it through differences in approach and in method. So in the end, the organization of the table of contents actually echoes that of Testo Junkie. So it alternates between chapters that are performing auto theory as method and chapters that take it up as an object of inquiry. And it was thrilling for us to bring together on that note, you know, scholars of auto theory, with practitioners of the form coming, you know, both from the realms of creative writing, the humanities, and the social sciences.
- [23:39]
Velashni Kupan
And we were delighted to have Preciado also contribute a volume since it brought it full circle, because that had been a model for us in many ways. And I will say, too, on the note of the primal scene, I had written that first essay when I saw a call for papers and had immediately read a piece written as a dialogue between two friends, friends of Alex's, in fact, at UC Berkeley. And there was something very wonderful about this apprehension of conversations that were happening and moments of recognition that were happening and moments of. Really, this is a term that Alex and I think with a lot, but of intimacy. It was particularly keen that this all unfolded during the pandemic. And so it was years before we met in person. So one of the things that was truly extraordinary in our composing and editing process of this volume was that we were engaged in an epistolary relationship. Right. And that is something that has struck me as part of what is so appealing about what we might say is a turn to the auto theoretical. Right. Is what does it mean to engage in this practice of the connecting of selves in a way that is always and so beautifully mediated by language? I mean, I felt like, you know, Madame de Sevigne. I felt like an 18th century letter writer sometimes. And we've lost some of that. Right. I think auto theory, among the many things as is, and it's obviously an art practice, an ethnographic practice, a writing practice, a performative based practice. But I think, for me, and I imagine Alex as well, it is a rooting back into the word and its many capacities for connection.
- [26:02]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Yeah, I think it's very obvious when one reads it how, like this construction and like the Thought which goes into like these different chapters and how much it creates this loop, or not like loop, but how, how it is not open ended. Right. Especially with the preciado piece at the end, the coda, which also has like a very different tone and like rounds it up basically. I was very first, I was surprised about it and then I think it made a lot of sense and I really enjoyed that especially. And something I'm always interested in when it comes to auto theory is the relation to canon and canonizing in the prose and in the theory itself. And I'm really interested how you to think about this especially. You have some of the seminal foundational positions here, like, like Crisiado, like Butler was really positively surprised to saw Stacy Young contributing something where she's like this position, which basically coins the term, introduced it to our scholarly discourse in 1997 and we haven't heard much of her lately in terms of scholarly work. But auto theory has quite complicated relation to canon where it is very critical of it, but it sort of creates this alternative canon maybe because most of the intertexts are shared in between these different positions. So I wanted to ask you how you both view this or how you can make sense of this like dialectical element within the reference structure and the theory itself.
- [27:55]
Alex Brostov
Yeah, it's a really, really great question because I so often think about, especially as I'm finishing my own monograph, I am so often thinking about what it means to perform mastery over a form that is in itself anti mastery. Right. And these are the fighting tides of working with, you know, experimental writing. I think, you know, one of the things that Velashny and I were interested in, and I'll. I'll loop back to canonization, but I actually wanna start with like frameworks. One of the things that we were seeing as the field has grown is the beginning of the schism. Right. You know, you know, a field is really forming when it begins to schism. So, you know, we were seeing kind of two schools of thought that we were interested in bringing into dialogue. And this speaks directly to like the ways in which the volume includes Stacy Young, for example, and also, you know, foundational figures like Butler and Persiano. So we were seeing kind of one framework that was very interested in thinking about auto theory's approach to embodied experience as a means of basically like delivering the subject to itself. Right. And on the other hand, right. We were seeing that very approach being deconstructed right. Through arguments that auto theory is precisely a function of its language where like bodies can only be Known through, if at all, through mediations of language. Right. And this is an approach that totally runs counter to, for example, critiques of auto theory, like in Anna Kornblue's Immediacy. Velashny and I, in our introduction to the volume, really insist that the auto is always already mediated. Right. And that it acknowledges auto theory as forum acknowledges the way a self is always mediated by language. So the diametrically opposed frameworks, the way we put it in the volume is like, on the one hand, auto theory's body. Right. The leaky membrane, the porousness, the porosity, and on the other hand, auto theory's words. Right. And that's the linguistic mediation. Right. So we're thinking about a subject that's being cut across by language, that is opaque to it. And we really wanted to bring both of those approaches into dynamic contact with each other in the volume, again, to underscore the plurality that is both internal to the form and to the scholarship that takes auto theory up as an object.
- [30:49]
Velashni Kupan
Right, right. Well, and I think this idea of canon is really interesting, especially since both of us, decades apart, came through comparative literature as a field at a moment when the question of the canon was very decisive. What did it mean to open up the classic French, German, English provenance of that particular discipline to other languages, other literatures, to a whole series of counter canon formations, but also to then witness the ways in which even counter canons calcify. Right. And if you think of the root, the Greek root for canon is of course, measuring stick. Right. We were in an interesting moment with the auto theory volume of beginning to measure a field or to take the measure of a field. That was very much in this process of unfolding. It had kind of hit the big time in this four or five year process where there were, what was it, four specialists issues. We'd had Lauren Fournier's amazing monograph, Autotheria's Feminist Art Practice. There were countless articles and dissertations becoming apparent. So there was a kind of real time quality to this registering of a plural emergence that made it really impossible, I think, to understand that as canon. That doesn't mean that there aren't, as you say, Mathis. I don't know if I want to say, central or necessary. There are texts that are points of density, they are referenced, they are nodes at which many traditions kind of converge and are working with that particular catalytic text. They're not just the texts we all know of the like, 80s, 90s and present time, part of the work of establishing a counter canon. If we Want to call it that, or maybe I like better. An anti canon is something that evades genealogies, right? That is something in the same way that we don't want to think about genre as a fixed set of rules, but rather the very opposite, something that comes to be in its breaking of rules, in its iteration, in its recombining, its recombinant DNA. I guess in the same way we want to think about genealogical traditions as not lines of descent, right? This is where I think the practices of queer theory have so informed not only auto theoretical literature itself, but the way the field has told the story of its emergence. And I'm thinking right now of my colleague, my dear colleague, Carla Frocero, who died last week, whose early work, Queer Early Modern in Renaissance Studies, had done so much at a very early time in queer theory to do, invite us to imagine the genealogical in forms of resonance, spectral hauntings, apparitional reinventions and kinships. So I think that tradition has really been at work in the process we're in right now, which is not just what is it? And it's not just what does it do, but it's how do we construct the story of that it. Right. And that's a real time, real world practice.
- [34:57]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Really interesting how you historicize it. I think that makes a lot of sense and it's such a complicated operation also in knowing how we live in it still. But like always, to historicize it's so important here, especially when it comes to this idea of canon. But the field in general, you mentioned the Pretzero piece, and I think that's one of the examples really in this volume of the more experimental writing being this dialogue form. And I wanted to ask both of you how you edit these type of texts, especially as like a non traditional approach to having a volume with certain essays on certain topics and then you just cluster them. But how you work in general as like a co editing practice, which connects to like the idea of like plurality, but also specifically how to work in editing experimental writing approaches, which this volume has and makes a good case to include. But how to do it basically, or what's your approach to it?
- [36:09]
Alex Brostov
Well, we're certainly not experts, I'll say that, but I think we were constantly asking ourselves this precise how to do it and how to do it together and how to do it ethically and how to do it with our contributors as dialogue, as community. And I think that so much of auto theoretical form offers us models for this within its citational circuit of attachment. Right. Auto Theory is a performance of readers reading readers. And we see this so often, whether it's, you know, Maggie Nelson reading Roland Barthes or whether it being preciado on, you know, the eve of Guillaume d' Estaing's death. Right. We see in auto theory's citational apparatus modes of care work, modes of grief work being performed in the way that, you know, that if we go back to the roots of the word citation, there is a summoning there. What does it mean to summon others through citation onto the page, into the conversation. So I think, you know, we took a cue from, you know, the auto theoretical practice and scholarship itself in terms of what it meant to read auto theoretically, which we theorize in part in the introduction. And we, you know, wanted to surface those. We wanted to encourage our contributors to surface those practices of reading within their own texts.
- [37:55]
Velashni Kupan
Right. Well, and I think that so beautifully captures the way we were thinking in coming to the assemblage of a volume. And it was a very deep kind of editing process. So I think first what happened is that Alex and I, the book proposal had been worked out by Alex working with others before, or the volume proposal rather. And then we reworked that for several months. So just the work of kind of like imagining the skeletal shape. What was the pitch? What was the kind of why this now accounts was something that put us, as you say, Alex, into this dialogue. And one of the things it did for us is over those five years, I think our writing became something that I've never had this experience as an academic before, but we were literally writing together. We went from I'll write a few paragraphs and you write a full paragraphs, and we'll get on zoom to being able to actually sit there and compose the sentences, alternatively fill them in. We can tell whose sentences are what because, you know, the text is deeply personal. Any text, the word is. But it was that kind of compositional intimacy that I think was really interesting. And again, this goes back to Alex's ethics of care, to be close but also adjacent to the project of the writer. Right. It's a kind of speaking formula. Right. To be alongside rather than speaking for. So we couldn't have their words be our words. But approaching the assemblage of this volume in a spirit, again, of a kind of collaborative ethics of care share. You know, again, I come back to this word of intimacy was a really unusual experience for me. And I think it also resonates on a larger level where so much of the way we think about our academic work is under the fetish economy of originality. I mean, that's what drives it, that's what is rewarded, that is the latter. And it's really important to be able to discover and model collaborative research for the profession in at large. I think for graduate students it's an incredibly rich and interesting model. There's an essay in the volume by Emma Lieber, a practicing analyst, in which she assembles her own words, the words and dialogues of students in her seminar. I mean, the kinds of knowledge forms that come out of this are also really rocking a canon or an accepted sense of what academic writing is as much as auto theoretical writing.
- [41:18]
Alex Brostov
Yeah, I mean, just gonna echo what Velashny said and add though that I think, like before we get too utopic about like the labor of putting a volume together, I wanna just share a very brief story and then we'll close out on this question. Question. At one of our launches at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Simone Sterner, who is also a scholar of auto theory, asked us, what kind of auto body is this? And I'll just say that we've gotten a lot of mileage out of this car metaphor, right? What kind of auto body is this volume? And you know, Velashny and I joke that, you know, this is an auto body where sometimes we drove around the roundabout and then we drove around again, and then we drove around again and then, you know, and we had a lot of junk in the trunk. And, you know, sometimes we got totally lost. We were, we didn't have a map. And sometimes we were in funky car chases after permissions and lost citations and lost contributors. But I think, you know, at the end of the day, what I, what I want to underscore about this car metaphor or the, the. My last extension of this car metaphor is that we really were not hung up on following directions. And when we got lost, we worked together to plot out a new route. And we did that not just with each other, but with our contributors. So this is all to say we worked with and through auto theories on Ruly grammars.
- [43:07]
Velashni Kupan
That's beautiful. I also should say that Alex really drove that car in so many ways. Of all of the assembling, the technical, the visionary composition, it was really a glorious ride for.
- [43:24]
Alex Brostov
Yeah, but you also, I mean, Balashni, you totally gave me, you know, I was a graduate student when we began this work, and it was such a joy to work with someone more experienced in the field who said, oh no, you can step on the gas there, Step on the gas. You know, like and that was really cool because it encouraged me, you know, to take risks that I wasn't comfortable taking in my own writing and my own dissertation and to think really creatively about the possibilities and limitations of, you know, what it meant to be a, you know, junior scholar in a really, in a burgeoning field. So I feel immensely grateful to have had that guidance.
- [44:14]
Velashni Kupan
Well, thank you. And you know, we've both developed auto theory classes in sync and had the wonderful experience of teaching that to undergrads and grads and just. Yeah, I think the pedagogical relationship that we have to others can't help but be informed to this collaborative. But be informed by this collaborative relationship. So, yeah, I do believe that there's something interesting being reproduced in this moment.
- [44:48]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Sounds like a very sweet practice or process. And I really enjoy the metaphor of the car here. I wanted to go back to the idea of the reader. Alexey said it's about readers reading readers. There's a lot of like Chris Tower's intertextuality accurate in it, this idea of like the reading as note writing as productive reading. You mentioned Kornblue's Immediacy before, which is more about this idea of how a reader is in relation to the text and especially in the immediate relation to the text. Art theory really focuses on the process of reading, the process of writing. It's very reflective and especially about the first person in prosecution. You have a lot of different angles and arguments in this volume about the specific field. What is your main interest in there? Or what's the arguments you would like to share?
- [45:53]
Alex Brostov
Are you asking specifically about what's the specific argument about auto theory as a mode of reading or auto theory kind
- [46:00]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
of writ large at large? Like what is the relation to the reader? What is new here? Basically,
- [46:08]
Velashni Kupan
I think one element that drew me early to auto theory and has persisted is its operation as reading. Right. The intertextuality, the citationality of it put us always already in an understanding of what Barthes would call this kind of writerly and readerly text, but a text in which it is precisely the non guarantee of semiotic meaning and the interpretive making of that and the engagement with a kind of system of signification that is really errant, we might even say promiscuous. Right. There's this kind of plurality of reference that for me, because I'm such a child of 80s of French theory, was the first place in which I came back to this sense of grace. What does it mean to be caught up as both a reader of text And a reader for whom the mode of textual criticism is also acting as a kind of reading. And now that has been so old fashioned. It has been whether it's through the new critical tradition or through what I think of as the kind of defensive reading, anti theory wave that we've seen in literary studies. And so I'm interested in how theory can reclaim the language of reading in this way. And you asked Matt this earlier about what does this have to do about practices of criticism? And there's a way in which the criticism can burst out the bounds of the text. Right. So it's not new criticism, it's not purely a kind of carnival of the signification that we would see in an earlier post structuralist or deconstructionist moment. And it's one that is absolutely suffused by a sense of the political project of reading. So you come back to bell hooks theory is liberatory practice. Right. We come back to something like Dionne Brand's and An Autobiography of the Biography of Reading. We come back to the traditions in various queer and trans and feminist and bipoc fields of the encounter with a textual tradition that then opens up a placing of oneself and one's community in contestation. It's both ancestral and it's looking forward. So I feel like as I started to think about all the people who are engaged in these acts of reading, and some of them, as Alex knows from their monograph project, are really insurgent acts of reading, I felt that it was a chance to go back to some questions I had asked in a much more disembodied way. Right. And I don't just mean because auto theory is very much of the body, though not exclusively. One of the gifts that Carla Forto's essay gave us is to say, don't so foreground the body, that language, the mediating functions of language slip away. Right. That there is no being without mediation, there is no like actual presence. But so to think about citationality, language, reading word in these ways feels like not just a theoretical practice, but I guess a critical practice. I think I'm still figuring out what that looks like, but it interests me.
- [50:16]
Alex Brostov
Maybe I can pick up on. You know, I've also been thinking about bell hooks theory as liberatory practice. And I just taught it alongside Barbara Christian's the Race for Theory. And there's a moment at the end of the race for theory, or actually it's not at the end. I think it might be closer to the beginning where Christian asks, she writes, quote, for whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism. And I think this is a question we should be asking about auto theory. For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do auto theory? Because in the race for theory, I understand Christian to be asking, well, like, why do we write about writing? And because auto theory is always a writing about readers or about readers reading readers. I think, you know, kind of to echo much of what Velashny was saying, it enjoins us to think about the ways in which language and the literary mediate our relation not only to the self, but to the social right? So auto theory is constantly grappling with, reckoning with, you know, encountering the kind of unruly grammars that have produced us and that have produced our relationship to those structures. In some ways, I think, you know, it's been interesting to me reading the critiques that appear in Immediacy, because one of its main charges is that auto theory is in fact, like complicit in dominant logics of hegemony, that it's the antithesis to collectivizing and political solidarity, which is a kind of baffling claim to me. If, you know, if we look at the auto theoretical texts, as Stacy Young does, as beginning with like this bridge called My Back, which is an anthology that is deeply invested in that project of collectivization and political solidarity. Now let me be clear that this is not to suggest that auto theory automatically or instantaneously or immediately like, produces a collective or a coalition. It's not that. But I do think that, you know, if we are thinking about performativity or what Peggy Phelan has called performative writing, right, then, you know, there is an attempt in this form, right, to produce change within its reader, right. Such that its performance of relationality, of attachment to other texts through intertextuality and citation, right, is a model of the building coalitions across discourses, across texts, across readers. And I'm interested in thinking about the work that auto theory does in the world, you know, and certainly it can be, you know, to return to the critique that appears in immediacy. Certainly it can, you know, like any literary form, be complicit in dominant logics of hegemony or be co opted by the neoliberal apparatus, but as Velashny said, it can also represent modes of insurgency against those very structures.
- [53:58]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Yeah, I would like to stay on that notion, like this question of on one hand, for whom, but really what is the work in the world? We mentioned Bell Hook's the Political Dimension of this whole process, and I think especially in the contemporary moment where we have on the one hand a lot of political debate and a very specific time, and also just these scholarly debate about the crisis of fury, if it's Parkour or Rockhill who have different approaches, but we can to a moan in general agree that the RLAC is being a very critical moment of the relation of critical theory and practice to our lived reality. I wanted to ask how you see auto theory in that context in the world, basically in our practices as scholars, as teachers, and how to situate like it's a very abstract research basically in this time in the work, in the world.
- [55:08]
Velashni Kupan
It's a beautiful question and an urgent one. And I agree that we are living in this moment of irrefusibility, of thinking about this connection between the self and the world. We're also living in a, a moment where the, the informationalization of the self in a very personal way. Right? The, the, the algorithmic feed that constitutes a self again and again and again in a way it understands to be itself. Right. This is the, this is the danger of, of propaganda, I guess, right? Or of the creation of a, of a mediascape which is also a subject of scape in which the idea of one's personal being becomes its own framework. Right. I mean, I think that. And you could write it large, you could keep it very unique. We're seeing all the things Alex and I believe auto theory does. Filiation, coalition, the transposition of deeply held personal feelings into political movements. And we're seeing it, of course, in a profoundly negative form. So it does make me think about what can our understanding of the subject through auto theory, what we're calling its provisionalities, its pluralities, its yet to form and harden qualities. I mean, can one have a political understanding of a self, of becoming? This is, you know, do people, as Judith Butler famously says, you know, sometimes you just. You march under banners. You don't march under selves of becoming. But what if auto theory is in part gripping us in the contemporary because the language of the personal has become in part, weaponized. All right, so that's one question I have, and I'm thinking about, and I'm also feeling that this is a moment in which we are living affective politics in a really, really intense way. And auto theory is deeply entwined with the affective right so much. Whether it is the chronicling of desire in its many and most raw forms, whether it is thinking about trauma and loss, about what it means to be a survivor, about what it means to have seen your community disappear. I'm thinking of Justan or the wave of trans auto theory about which Alex is teaching and writing right now. But there's a way in which auto theories coming from both positive affects and negative affects really invites us to think not just about who is this self, but what are the mechanisms by which the affective registers of an experience or a contemporary moment make and unmake a self. Right. What is there a potentiality to engaging deeply with the voicing that comes through affective inhabiting? This is a project that's very dear, of course, to Stuart and Berlant, but I think is also really true in a lot of the most well known auto theoretical texts. But I'm curious for Alex to also talk about this.
- [59:08]
Alex Brostov
No, I mean, I have very little to add. Maybe, maybe I can just underscore the thought that, you know, it's not just a question of, you know, who is in auto theory, but again, for whom is it right? And what are the structuring worlds that have produced that relationship. Right. Between the who and the for whom? You know, we. We write about auto theory as articulating a self confronting the pasts and the structures that produce it, the people who hail it, the worlds through which it moves. And in that sense it's, you know, it's a potent. It has a kind of potent potentiality in that sense for being an analytical lens for. Through which we seek to interrogate the structuring worlds that have produced us and through which we continue to move with each other.
- [60:13]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
I think that's a really great take on that. Yeah, I would like to come to an end. But to end on a more positive note, we already talked about that. You have a monograph project coming up. So first of all, thank you both for joining me today and talk to you and I would like to ask what's coming next for you too. What are you working on? If there's something you want to share, which is in the making.
- [60:41]
Alex Brostov
Thanks for this question. I was really, you know, before we got on to this zoom, I was telling Velocny I want to be really careful to like differentiate between the work we've done in the volume and the work I'm doing in my monograph because I'm like so deep in it right now, so. So I'm working on a monograph that offers a critical reframing of auto theory, but it's building largely on the work that Velashny and I do in the volume, thinking about the ways in which the auto is Always already relational. However, that being said, so many accounts of auto theory have focused almost exclusively on the global north, on auto theory as a Euro American innovation. And that has worried me in the sense that it, you know, obscures other genealogies and it also limits what we understand auto theory to be. And to do so, I'm working on a monograph that recasts auto theory's place in the political history of trans and queer literatures of the Americas. So instead of thinking of auto theory as kind of like a unitary category, that we renders other practices intelligible as such. So, like, in other words, I'm not thinking about auto theory as the umbrella category, but rather, in my monograph I'm comparing and collating divergent genealogies that reflect on the encounter or interfacing between poststructuralist thought and translation alongside trans and queer of color feminisms and decolonial critique. So I'm thinking, for example, about the ways that flesh and figuration and politics are conjoined in work by authors like Gloria Ansaldua and Camila Sosa Viada and Cristina Rivera Garza, thinking about the relationship
- [62:50]
Velashni Kupan
between
- [62:52]
Alex Brostov
or the ways in which encounters can queer the relation. Sorry, I've said relation a lot. Let me start over. I'm interested in staging encounters. My monograph is interested in staging encounters that, like, queer the relationship between the structural conditions that produce a writing subject and then the collective function of that writing. So I'm doing this from an intertextual and transnational hemispheric perspective. And the more I practice that, the smoother it'll go. It's, you know, work in progress. So every time I do it, it's a little different, but it's coming well.
- [63:40]
Velashni Kupan
I love this account of the need and the mode that. That bringing geopolitical readings to our understanding of auto theory would do. And this too is part of that larger project of pluralization. It is sharply decolonial. It converges with the comparative in the world literary models that I think Alex and I are both engaged with. So, and that's something I've begun. Begun to think about for a long time. I've been mostly thinking through an auto theory engagement with love. That is the affect that I've been working most with. I've been teaching a course that was inspired by someone giving me a copy of Barthes Fragments of a Lover's Discourse many years ago. And in working out from that text, which is of course an auto theoretical node for so many, it's been a really fascinating chance to think through it has elements of, I suppose, breakup, Joanna Walsh's breakup, which is to say, like, there's personal work, but there's also theoretical work. There's a kind of meditation on the many forms that love takes. It may even have a kind of slightly ethnographic quality because I've been thinking about the role that that particular affect plays in contemporary life, in the lives of the people who are our students age. So that's one thing I'm working on, on a short piece that is being edited by one of our former graduate students, Thais Miller. And it's called Creative Critical Ancestors. And I'm going to write something about bell hooks for this, which is just an incredible joy to think about that. And that's an occasion actually, to go back a very, very long time. Bell hooks taught at Yale when I was an undergrad. And I'm thinking through what it was to be in the orbit of that very, very early moment in kind of like the institutionalization, it was hardly institutionalization in 1985, of black feminist theory. So that's going back to this for whom is theory when we do it as theory question that Alex has put so beautifully. And I am just beginning to think about a project of exhuming, which is a world literature project that I've had that's articulated around South Africa, the Indian Ocean and Australia. And it's always had a lot of personal vignettes in it. And it's been very interested in the question of how do we avoid what Spivak calls the view from 30,000ft up when doing critical theory, Right? What does it mean to place the critic or theorist of a particular field of theory, in this case world literature, which is so systemic in its models, right? It's about passages, waves, circulatory dynamics of texts themselves. But again, one was seeing it as a phenomenon in which one is not oneself placed. And I've been working recently with telling that story of those particular literary sites in a way in which I'm very much more placed in it. And that's, you know, that was a project that really hadn't gelled when I first wrote a draft of it maybe, I don't know, five or six years ago, before I came to auto theory. And I'm just starting to think about whether it may be through this engagement with auto theory that I can come back to my work as a critical theorist. This is very in process and very uncooked. But that is. That is something I would like to start thinking with. And I've been doing grad seminars around it and things.
- [68:19]
Matt Schickerfer (Interviewer)
Sounds great. I'm always really interested in this question of like, not question, but that after a project is always like before a multitude of projects where. How so rhythmic. How like one question always leads to multiple other questions. So good to see that that people are working on it and you both are like, continuing and figuring out these different perspectives which are so important and so interesting. Thank you so much for contributing this volume. Thank you so much for general scholarly work. And taking the time to speak was really great. Thank you.
- [68:53]
Velashni Kupan
Thank you, Mathis.
- [68:55]
Alex Brostov
Really a pleasure.