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

by Patricia Stuelke

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478021575
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/09/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Patricia Stuelke is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: "After That, Baby . . ."  1
1. Freedom to Want  31
2. "Debt Work"  71
3. Solidarity as Settler Absolution  107
4. Veteran Diversity, Veteran Asynchrony  149
5. Invasion Love Plots and Antiblack Acoustics  189
Conclusion: Against Repair  215
Notes  219
Bibliography  265
Index  301

Editorial Reviews

“This brilliant study is a long-overdue critique of the flight from paranoid reading to reparative feeling in the humanities. Patricia Stuelke historicizes the turn to repair as symptom of, rather than as solution to, US violence, militarism, and counterinsurgency. Her examination of the rise of US neoliberal empire in the 1970s and 1980s from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East is sui generis and eye-opening.”

-- David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

“Patricia Stuelke offers an exciting interrogation of reparative modes of artistic, literary, and solidarity activism to establish how fantasies of repair serve US militaristic inventions and neoliberal financialization. Calling into question one of the foundations of liberal investments in political economy—that repair is achievable outside the circuits of capitalism and governance---Stuelke makes an important intervention into arguments about reparative justice in American studies, critical ethnic studies, literary studies, and critical theory.”

-- Jodi Byrd, author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

“The Ruse of Repair will require its readers to reevaluate some of the beliefs they hold most dear, transforming American studies, ethnic and critical race studies, feminist studies, and beyond in the process.”

-- María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States

"The Ruse of Repair seamlessly interweaves two core methodological paradigms of American Studies scholarship: the political history of cultural formations and the cultural history of political formations. The Ruse of Repair makes audible, with great clarity, the echoes of an emergent neoliberal ideology in the rhetorics and social forms of feminism, antiracism, and anti-imperialism."

-- Eli Jelly-Schapiro ALH

From the Publisher