Introduction: Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality, and "I"

Abstract

Introduction:Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality, and "I" Alex Brostoff (bio) and Lauren Fournier (bio) This special issue convenes artistic practitioners with early-career and established scholars to engage the burgeoning field of autotheory. As a point of departure, we begin first and foremost with a conception of autotheory as an art of the present. By hailing autotheory as an "art," we bring together practicing autotheorists as well as scholars of autotheory—where the two are often one and the same. Intricately complicated, deliciously slippery: where to draw the line between the life and the work, between theory and practice? Does the attempt to draw a line in fact draw attention to the very impossibility of doing so? The line, it would appear, lies. Second, this issue spotlights the ways in which autotheory's distinctive deconstruction of theory and practice unsettles Eurocentric ways of knowing, proffering a method of responding to contemporary calls to decolonize. Contributors animate decolonial approaches to knowledge production and subject formation in visual, literary, and performance arts, while attending to the ways in which autotheory may participate in broader projects of decolonial praxis. Third and finally, in keeping with the politics and polyvocality of autotheory itself, this special issue sutures self to social to structural, underscoring their emergence as mutually constitutive and interdependent. If there is an autotheoretical turn, then it is a turning outward, traversing what autotheory does in translation and in citation, in postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous epistemologies, in transfeminisms and queer pedagogies, in the archive and beyond the academic industrial complex. [End Page 489] Fusing self-representation with philosophy and critical theory, autotheory moves between "theory" and "practice," between "living," "thinking," and "making."1 It is critical and it is creative; it is experiential and experimental; it is scholarly and it is popular. It brings theory to life and life to theory. It plays with personal polemic, positing a speaking self in the act of writing "I," and then, self-reflectively and self-reflexively, it deconstructs itself. Autotheory's genealogies spring from the institutions it seeks to critique. It privileges thinking with over thinking against; its politics of citation unveil its relations. From social media technologies to the publishing industry, from live performance to visual art, autotheory's escalating ubiquity in cultural production serves as a critical provocation: why autotheory and why now? What motivates the methodological melding of an autobiographical "I" with academic scholarship? And what implications does theorizing the self have for the politics of knowledge production, broadly conceived? Autotheory, this issue collectively contends, does not merely crop up on literary or theoretical grounds, nor do its roots grow solely in Euro-American soils. Considering the rapid rise of popular and scholarly interest in works like Paul B. Preciado's Testo Yonqui (Testo Junkie) (2008), Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014), Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2006), and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015), and renewed interest in works such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick (1997), among others, autotheory's recent popularization suggests a pressing need for analogous critical discourse. In the U.S., the term has garnered popular acclaim from Nelson's The Argonauts. And although Nelson credits Preciado with coining the neologism, the term has also emerged in other contexts, at other times. Stacey Young's Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (1997) introduces the [End Page 490] English-language adjective "autotheoretical" to describe queer women of color anthologies published by American indie presses in the early 1980s.2 Young's approach to the autotheoretical texts is linked to activism, illustrating how self-theorizing is bound not only to structural critique but to social change writ large. In this issue, we echo Young's insistence on the centrality of the work of queer women of color to the emergence of autotheory. In the past year alone, autotheory has been read both as "theory" and as "practice," although current definitions of the term remain limited by the particular genealogies they trace. In the introduction to "Autotheory Theory," a special issue...