Unhinged, an alliance: Creativecritical writing and ecstatic citations

Abstract

This contribution will focus on creativecritical citational devices. We will position creativecritical writing in relation to scholarly research and the academic writing it typically results in, as well as performative writing and autotheory (a performative form in itself). Following Katherine McKittrick’s provocation “What if the practice of referencing, sourcing, and crediting … takes us outside ourselves?” (2021, p. 16), we understand creativecritical citational works as ecstatic: they stand outside themselves. At the same time, performative writing’s citationality creates an “affective alliance with writing itself” (Pollock, 1998, p. 94) – “affective alliance” being key in autotheory too. Ecstatic citations, then, allow text and voice to transcend themselves while opening up to these alliances, becoming other-like in the process. McKittrick names this as an unknowing and unhinging of the self (2021, p. 16). Similarly, Amy Hollywood describes “the self-shattering that occurs through identification with the lacerated textual other” (2002, p. 59). These creativecritical citational gestures imply an ecstatic merging with textualities and subjectivities that are radically different: historically (the anachronistic), existentially (the non-human) and even ontologically (the fictional). Putting all of this together, in this creativecritical contribution we will examine writing that becomes ecstatic, both in form and content, more self-expanding than self-reflective – luminous, slippery, weird.