Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique

"Beginning with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, prominent literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique and hailed the 'reparative' mode as a more humane and humble way of approaching literature and culture. This commitment torepair as kinder and more ethical approach to critique has traveled far beyond the academy, shaping how people imagine justice, solidarity, and social change. But this valorization of the reparative did not arrive out of nowhere. The Ruse of Repair locates the hidden history of the reparative turn in the consolidation of, and failed struggle against, the neoliberal racial capitalist imperialist order in the late 1970s and 1980s"--
Patricia Stuelke traces the hidden history of the reparative turn, showing how it emerged out of the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s and unintentionally supported new forms of neoliberal and imperial governance.
Since the 1990s, literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique and hailed the reparative mode of criticism as a more humane and humble way of approaching literature and culture. The reparative turn has traveled far beyond the academy, influencing how people imagine justice, solidarity, and social change. In The Ruse of Repair, Patricia Stuelke locates the reparative turn's hidden history in the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. She shows how feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist liberation movements' visions of connection across difference, practices of self care, and other reparative modes of artistic and cultural production have unintentionally reinforced forms of neoliberal governance. At the same time, the US government and military, universities, and other institutions have appropriated and depoliticized these same techniques to sidestep addressing structural racism and imperialism in more substantive ways. In tracing the reparative turn's complicated and fraught genealogy, Stuelke questions reparative criticism's efficacy in ways that will prompt critics to reevaluate their own reading practices.