More Life After Ruins: Autotheory, the Politics of Citation, and the Limits of The Scholarly Gaze

Abstract

More Life After Ruins:Autotheory, the Politics of Citation, and the Limits of The Scholarly Gaze Leila C. Nadir (bio) A reflection on my autotheoretical essay, "Life After Ruins: Ruderal Ecologies, Afghan Diaspora, and Another Anthropocene," published in ASAP/J on September 27, 2019. "A name makes reading too easy." A famous philosopher, who wanted to remain anonymous, said this in a now-famous interview. He withheld his name "out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard." He dreamed of a year of "anonymous books," published with no authors' names attached, but he knew this would do no good: critics don't truly want to read, he said, so they would ignore this year of difficult books. Traditional academic scholarship and many forms of autotheory traffic in names. My introduction here is more powerful, more authoritative, more readable, more useful, because I might reveal a famous name. If you know the name I'm talking about, I've just established my theory bona fides. If you don't know, pay attention and you may accumulate a smidgeon of capitalizable gains in the pillaging competition that has become neoliberal academia. Autotheory simultaneously participates in, and disrupts, this hackneyed holy practice. And that is what excites me, and concerns me, about the turn toward autotheory. Autotheory has been an evolution of selfdiscovery for me, a recognition that my experiences as an Afghan-American from an immigrant Muslim family matter, that my own life is in dialogue with the most lauded names and ideas of our time. It's been a way for me to find my way back into academic practices that have alienated me, after I retreated from traditional scholarship to become an artist and creative writer. It has been a redemption of some kind—a way to speak back to the academic managers, editors, and administrators bestowed with the power to monitor the boundaries of what counts as scholarship, the academic employees that, [End Page 547] through the subtleties of institutional protocols and policies, work (often unknowingly) to exclude and invisibilize racialized Others who cannot conform to so-called detached, professional objectivity without erasing our bodies and experiences and ways of inhabiting the world. Now, if I cite enough famous names, perhaps I can be published and heard. Perhaps. And this is what concerns me about autotheory. When I read works like Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother or Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, or when I pen my own personal essays injected with critical theory, I'm hopeful that we are producing an antidote to the parochial understandings of intellectual work passed off as R1 rigor. But I wonder, in this merger of the personal and the critical, the aesthetic and the philosophical, would we be taken as seriously without the citation of authoritative names? What if Nelson left out the theorists in the page margins of Argonauts? Or if Hartman deleted the endnotes that anchor her memoir in critical theory? (I do love how Nelson and Hartman relegate the authorities to the periphery.) What if my essay "Life After Ruins," published on ASAP/J, hadn't mentioned James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donna Haraway, Henry Thoreau, and Sun Ra? Would the story of my embodied experiences of living in the post-Cold War Afghan diaspora, and how they relate to my environmental art practices, be as digestible or useful? Would I truly be read? What if I hadn't articulated my ideas in relation to the concept suddenly invigorating the Environmental Humanities, the one and only Anthropocene, or the emergent discourse on Ruderal Ecologies, introduced by Bettina Stoetzer into Anthropology? "Life After Ruins" was an explanation of my creative artworks, which so many critics hadn't taken the time to read until I pulled in the names. Like the famous masked philosopher said, readers don't read until they see road signs announcing that these pages have referenceable merit, that they are collecting fractionated shares of academic capital. Would we, as autotheorists, be taken as seriously without trading in the stock market of names? Yet I also feel that what we are doing is a reclamation: hacking academic...