Autotheory erases prior women-of-color practices it claims to invent

Evidence

Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). See also Max Cavitch, “Everybody’s Autotheory,” Modern Language Quarterly 83:1 (March 2022), 81-116; and Kyla Wazana Tompkins: “How is autotheory not what women of color were already doing in the 1980s. Someone please explain this amnesia to me, or unpack the differences” (@kwazana, Twitter post, August 19, 2021, twitter. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 627

Categorization

• QUESTION: The critique charges autotheory with historical amnesia about who pioneered the form — worth interrogating when assessing the chapter’s Antitheory position.
• XREF: Pairs with the reader’s goal of fighting with the Antitheory chapter — the charge of amnesia gives a concrete handle on what’s wrong with immediacy genres.