The Ruse of Repair

“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