Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Interview with Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan, Editors of "Autotheories" (MIT Press, 2025)
Host: Matt Schickerfer
Date: March 6, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode of the New Books Network features a conversation with Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan, co-editors of Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025), an anthology exploring the emerging field of autotheory. The discussion delves into the plurality and politics of autotheoretical practices, its relationship to genre, canon, pedagogy, and the collaborative and affective registers that shape both the form and its study. The conversation is accessible both to those new to the field and seasoned scholars, highlighting the evolving and plural nature of autotheory and its significance for contemporary literary criticism and theory.

Introductions & Academic Backgrounds

[04:20] Velashni Cooppan:

• Works in comparative and world literature; focus on intertextuality, anti/decolonial and postcolonial writing, and literary circulations.
• Draws from 1980s French theory, women of color feminism, gender theory, and regional studies in the Indian Ocean and European contexts.
• Interested in how personal voices narrate histories (e.g., slavery, indenture).

[06:28] Alex Brostoff:

• Hemispheric Americanist: Focus on 20th/21st-century trans and queer literatures.
• Interested in reframing autotheory, especially regarding relational/transnational aspects and its roots in the Global South.
• Translator (Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish); engaged with comparative and translation studies.

What is "Autotheory"? Defining a Plural Field

Working Definitions and Key Distinctions

[09:30] Alex Brostoff:

• “The million dollar question we get asked first every time, what is Autotheory?”
• Autotheory is approached as genre, practice, and method, bringing together creative nonfiction, life writing, autobiography, critical theory, philosophy, etc.
• Not a monolithic category; inherently plural and hybrid.

[10:17] Velashni Cooppan:

• Autotheory is a “genre that shatters itself” and resists static definition.
  • “A genre that refuses its own definition...We both love Derrida’s law of genre that...asks us to see the undoing of that category.”
• Operations: Plurality of forms (memoir, diary, dream journal, archival self), psychogeography, relation, and plurality of the narrating subject.
• Opposes the critique of navel-gazing; emphasizes self as plural, processual, citational, and embedded in relational webs.

[13:51] Alex Brostoff:

• Title’s plural (“Autotheories”) signals non-monolithic, proliferating, and diverse approaches and subjects within the field.
  • “Auto theory is not a monolith, right? Its iterations proliferate, its genealogies and its pedagogies bifurcate, its efficacy fluctuates.”

[15:50] Velashni Cooppan:

• Challenge to the genealogy of the lone theorist; instead, roots subjectivity in community and coalitional traditions.
  • “Auto Theory is much more for us about a doing...we might think of it as performativity.”

[17:04] Alex Brostoff:

• Encourages focus not on “what is autotheory,” but “what does autotheory do”—socially, politically, relationally.

Plurality in Practice: Editing the Volume

The Anthology’s Structure & Genealogies

[19:17] Matt Schickerfer:

• Highlights the volume’s plurality: “the jigsaw...multiple genealogies…different types on how to write text.”

[20:34] Velashni Cooppan:

• The origin story: Brostoff began with a special issue for ASAP Journal during the pandemic, which led to this much larger collection.
  • Moment of recognition:
    “I read Velashni’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.” (Alex Brostoff, [22:18])

[22:18] Alex Brostoff:

• Volume organization: Not by identity, but by differences in approach and method.
• Alternates between chapters performing autotheory and those treating it as an object of inquiry, echoing Testo Junkie.

[23:38] Velashni Cooppan:

• Emphasizes intimacy, collaboration, and epistolary practice—much of the project was co-edited remotely during the pandemic.
  • “It was years before we met in person...an epistolary relationship...part of what is so appealing about a turn to the auto theoretical.”

Canons, Counter-Canons, and the Ethics of Plurality

[26:01] Matt Schickerfer:

• Raises the question of autotheory’s complex relation to the canon—critical of canon, yet generating its own counter-canon.

[27:55] Alex Brostoff:

• Notes emerging schisms in the field:
  • Embodied, experiential approaches vs. linguistic mediation.
  • “I am so often thinking about what it means to perform mastery over a form that is in itself anti-mastery.”
• The volume brings “internal plurality” into contact with differing frameworks (e.g., Stacy Young, Butler, Preciado).

[30:49] Velashni Cooppan:

• Comparative literature’s role in de-centering canonical genealogies.
• Emphasizes counter-canons that resist calcification:
  • “...I like better, an anti-canon is something that evades genealogies... not lines of descent, but... resonance, spectral hauntings, apparitional reinventions and kinships.”
• The history of the field is being written in real time through acts of plural emergence.

Editing Experimental Writing: Process, Intimacy, and Collaboration

[36:08] Alex Brostoff:

• Co-editing as a dialogic and ethical enterprise reflecting autotheory’s core values (“readers reading readers”).
  • “Auto Theory is a performance of readers reading readers...modes of care work, modes of grief work...summoning others through citation.”

[37:55] Velashni Cooppan:

• Personal, intensive collaborative process:
  • Sentence-level co-writing.
  • “It was that kind of compositional intimacy that I think was really interesting...to model collaborative research for the profession at large.”
• Cites contributions that mix personal and collective voices (e.g., Emma Lieber’s essay).

[41:18] Alex Brostoff:

• Offers a car/auto-body metaphor for the messiness and risk-taking of collaborative editing:
  • “Sometimes we drove around the roundabout...we got totally lost...What I want to underscore...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.”

Reader and Writer: Autotheory and the Politics of Citation

[44:48] Matt Schickerfer:

• Asks about the role and novelty of the reader in autotheory.

[46:07] Velashni Cooppan:

• Stresses autotheory’s orientation as acts of reading, intertextuality, and citationality.
• Draws from Barthes, bell hooks, Dionne Brand.
• These practices resist both old-school “new critical” and contemporary anti-theory approaches.
  • “Criticism can burst out the bounds of the text...absolutely suffused by a sense of the political project of reading.”

[50:16] Alex Brostoff:

• Invokes Barbara Christian’s question: For whom are we doing what we are doing?
• Argues autotheory’s model is one of relationality, coalition, and insurgency—contesting the idea that it is inherently neoliberal or anti-collective.

Autotheory in Contemporary Politics and Academia

[53:57] Matt Schickerfer:

• Raises the stakes: How does autotheory work in the world (amid scholarly and political crises)?

[55:07] Velashni Cooppan:

• Highlights the irrefusibility of thinking about the self/world connection (in a time of algorithmic, informationalized selves).
• Notes both positive and negative political uses of self-narration and affect.
  • “We are living affective politics in a really, really intense way. And autotheory is deeply entwined with affective...what are the mechanisms by which the affective registers of an experience...make and unmake a self?”

[59:07] Alex Brostoff:

• Stresses autotheory as an analytical lens for interrogating the worlds and structures producing the self.

Looking Ahead: Future Projects and Continuing Pluralization

[60:40] Alex Brostoff:

• Upcoming monograph: Reframes autotheory from a transnational perspective, focusing on political histories of trans and queer literatures of the Americas, and seeking to decenter Euro-American genealogies.
  • “I’m not thinking about auto theory as the umbrella category, but...comparing and collating divergent genealogies..."

[63:40] Velashni Cooppan:

• Current work includes:
  • Auto-theory and love as affect; inspired by Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse.
  • Personal writing, scholarly meditations, and world literature with emphasis on self-placement and critical autobiography.
  • “What does it mean to place the critic or theorist...in a way in which I’m very much more placed in it...It’s been very interesting to think about whether it may be through engagement with autotheory that I can come back to my work as a critical theorist.”

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Auto theory is a genre that shatters itself...we both love Derrida’s law of genre that...asks us to see the undoing of that category.”
  —Velashni Cooppan, [10:17]

• “Auto theory is not a monolith, right? Its iterations proliferate, its genealogies and its pedagogies bifurcate, its efficacy fluctuates.”
  —Alex Brostoff, [13:51]

• “Auto Theories is much more for us about a doing...we might think of it as operation, we might think of it as performativity.”
  —Velashni Cooppan, [15:50]

• “Auto Theory is a performance of readers reading readers...what does it mean to summon others through citation onto the page, into the conversation.”
  —Alex Brostoff, [36:08]

• “I am so often thinking about what it means to perform mastery over a form that is in itself anti-mastery.”
  —Alex Brostoff, [27:55]

• “It was that kind of compositional intimacy that I think was really interesting...it is a rooting back into the word and its many capacities for connection.”
  —Velashni Cooppan, [23:38]

• “Criticism can burst out the bounds of the text...and it’s absolutely suffused by a sense of the political project of reading.”
  —Velashni Cooppan, [46:07]

• “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do auto theory?”
  —Alex Brostoff, paraphrasing Barbara Christian, [50:16]

Key Timestamps

• [04:20] – Guest introductions and academic background
• [09:30] – Defining “autotheory”; plurality and process
• [13:51] – Why the plural ("autotheories")?
• [20:34] – Genesis of the volume and editorial process
• [27:55] – Plural frameworks; the body, language, and canon
• [36:08] – Editing, collaborative intimacy, and experimental forms
• [44:48] – The politics of reading and citationality
• [53:57] – Autotheory’s political stakes today
• [60:40] – Future research, upcoming projects, and concluding remarks

Conclusion

This rich conversation foregrounds autotheory as a deeply plural, performative, and political endeavor. Brostoff and Cooppan argue that autotheory is less a genre than a set of insurgent practices that unsettle the boundaries of self, form, canonicity, and scholarly method. Their volume, Autotheories, seeks to model this plurality, offering diverse methodologies, experimental writings, and collaborative pedagogical visions. The interview serves as both an introduction and a deep dive into how autotheory might help scholars, writers, and readers navigate the personal and collective dimensions of criticism, politics, and reading in our contemporary moment.