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

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/qed.10.2.0211

2327-1590

Jacob E. Aplaca,

Political Economy and Marxism

There is no shortage of critiques of Eve Sedgwick's seminal "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" and the scholarly work developed in its wake, which notably includes Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's "Surface Reading" and Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique. Patricia Stuelke's ambitious new monograph, The Ruse of Repair, expands upon this previous criticism, locating the origins of queer and literary studies' reparative turn in the rise of the U.S. neoliberal empire across the Americas during the late 1970s and 1980s. She argues that today's interpretive practices that emphasize emotional attachment, "weak" theory, and other so-called reparative approaches are "more historically specific than [they] might seem" (Sedgwick's words), emerging out of, on the one hand, an increased sense of exhaustion among activists in the face of unabating U.S. state violence and, on the other, the "dreams of compassionate connection . . . across borders and racial and class divides" espoused by the transnational solidarity and feminist movements of the Reagan-era (26). These historical shifts, Stuelke argues, seeded the academic turn toward the affect-laden affordances of repair in the coming decades, making available a critical orientation that could forgo the paranoia of critique—in part the sense that, despite our best efforts, critique has failed to change the world—for the good feeling proffered by the smaller-scale operations of repair. But for Stuelke, this turn away from critique deserves greater scrutiny. For while repair might offer a temporary salve for the pain wrought by the present, it risks putting aside indefinitely the difficult labor of fostering "worlds that break definitely with this one" (17).The Ruse of Repair develops this argument over five chapters. The first two chart the ways in which sex-radical and U.S. Black feminisms were imbricated in the neoliberal economic transformations wrought by the U.S. government across the Americas and the Caribbean. Engaging texts such as Kate Millet's Going to Iran, chapter 1 examines sex-radical feminism's reparative celebration of individual female sexual desire as itself productive of a radical transnational politics—a conflation implicated in the "deregulatory ethos of a neoliberal state" and its valorization of "the allegedly free choices of its deregulated, unprotected subjects" (53). Chapter 2 extends this line of investigation by attending to what Stuelke calls the U.S. "Black feminist reparative imaginary," which she argues cast the Caribbean as a "free zone for black women's individual and collective autonomy and desire" during a period of increased U.S. economic and military intervention in Grenada and beyond (76, 78). Reading works by Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, Stuelke examines how Black feminists' reparative engagement with the Caribbean elided the economic and political reality of U.S. neocolonial encroachment in the region and, in the process, unwittingly propagated what were "American exceptionalist fantasies of black diasporic solidarity" (76).Shifting attention to the Central American solidarity movements of the 1980s, Chapter Three interrogates the turn away from activist projects aimed at challenging the violence of Reagan's foreign policy in Central America in favor of activities between U.S. activists and Central American refugees that aimed to craft "collective feeling" across "differences of power, history, and geography" (118). This chapter best allegorizes Stuelke's wider critique of the reparative turn in the academy, demonstrating how an exhaustion with "movement work in the face of unabating state violence" led to the prioritization of the U.S. activists' own emotions (110). Yet as Stuelke argues, such activities, which often took the form of consuming the live testimonios of Central Americans, were ultimately driven only by a want of absolution from "the guilt of their complicity in US empire," not a desire to challenge its violent operations (110).Stuelke bills the final two chapters as case studies that consider how the U.S. university and military worked to deradicalize movement knowledges and, in so doing, to mediate wider public understandings of U.S. empire and neoliberal racial capitalism. Chapter 4 explores the role U.S. MFA program fiction played in recuperating the figure of the Vietnam War veteran, transforming him from an emblem of U.S. imperial atrocities into a literary figure capable of elucidating the new forms of social precarity forged in the rise of neoliberal capital. Chapter 5 turns to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 when the U.S. military trapped Manuel Noriega, Panama's president and former U.S. collaborator, in the Papal Nuncio of Panama City and then, in what Stuelke calls an act of "sonic warfare," blasted rock/pop music into the compound. She reads this playlist of love-gone-wrong songs broadcast by U.S. radio stations, requested by the soldiers themselves and U.S. listeners, as a reparative effort to recast the invasion as the "culmination of a bad romance" between the United States and Noriega (201).As a whole, The Ruse of Repair offers a bracing history of the rise U.S. neoliberal empire in the Americas and Caribbean while also launching a thought-provoking theoretical inquiry into the wider implications of the reparative "turn from critique" that will be of interest to scholars across the humanities. At the same time, queer scholars may take issue with the fact that, despite the back-cover hailing scholars of both "literary and queer studies," Stuelke does not fully engage the latter field. Sedgwick remains central throughout Stuelke's analysis; however, she meaningfully engages few contemporary queer scholars engaging in reparative criticism (Heather Love is an exception). Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus are among her primary interlocuters (besides Sedgwick) in the introduction, and yet, as David Kurnick notes, their essay "Surface Reading" "does not frame itself as an intervention in queer studies" and names the field among the most eager practitioners of the critical methods they disavow.1The Ruse of Repair also overlooks the work of queer of color critique, which has demonstrated a frequent commitment to the promises of reparativity and would have productively challenged Stuelke's rejection of the reparative tout court. For instance, Stuelke cites José Muñoz (a student of Sedgwick) only once to question how reparative theories such as his disidentification often equate the "world-making project of surviving within homophobic capitalist heteroculture" with "changing the world," even though the former "does not bring an end to capitalism and empire" (58).2 That Stuelke wrests these two things—the "world-making of surviving" and "changing the world"— from each other throughout the book seems a misleading theoretical move, particularly in light of Muñoz's later Cruising Utopia, an avowedly reparative, even worldmaking project, which hardly eschews critique. Conceiving of queerness as futurally oriented, Muñoz challenges us to interrogate how radical queer efforts to change the world while also fighting to survive within a "homophobic capitalist heteroculture" have been compromised by the failure of "neoliberal thought and gay assimilationist politics" to imagine otherwise worlds.3 This seems the work of critique—but repair, too. Indeed, that the boundary between critique and repair appears so strict in The Ruse of Repair is not because it is universally acknowledged as such, but only because Stuelke frames it that way.In fact, a brief inquiry into one of Stuelke's own examples of repair-gone-wrong gestures to the inextricability of repair and critique effaced by her analysis. Near the end of her second chapter, Stuelke turns to Lorde's reparative engagement with Carriacou and Grenada in Zami as matrilineal "site[s] of collective refuge and creative possibility" (102). According to Stuelke, Lorde's romanticization of these places, along with her elision of Grenada's revolutionary present, implicate her in the violent onslaught of U.S. neoliberal empire happening at the same moment (102-3). But as Stuelke goes on to argue, Lorde would later realize she had been fooled by repair's ruse. Stuelke quotes Lorde's "Grenada Revisited," in which Lorde narrates her visit to the island following the US invasion: "I looked around me, talked with Grenadians. . . . Grenada is their country. I am only a relative. I must listen long and hard and ponder the implications of what I have heard, or be guilty of the same arrogance of the U.S. government in believing there are external solutions to Grenada's future" (103). This, for Stuelke, is evidence of a penitent Lorde having realized the limits of the "black feminist reparative imaginary" and its collusions with US imperialism—a critique of both the U.S. and Zami's sentimentalized portrayal of the Caribbean. However, what Stuelke does not include from this essay—what immediately follows the above quotation and concludes "Grenada Revisited"—is telling, for while Lorde is weary of her own arrogance, she still asserts unequivocally her pride in being "of stock from the country that mounted the first Black English-speaking People's Revolution in this hemisphere." She as well still celebrates the resilience of the Grenadians she encounters, who bring to mind her mother's words: "Island women make good wives. Whatever happens, they've seen worse." And finally, she declares, with love, "Much has been lost in Grenada, but not all—not the spirit of the people. Forward Ever, Backward Never is more than a mere whistle in the present dark."4The power of Lorde's earlier self-critique—the frankness with which she identifies her imbrication with the powerful US empire—cannot be denied. But at the end of her essay, there is also still hope, still identification, still pride in her matrilineal roots, and still repair. Critique and repair, and their revolutionary capacity to, in-tandem, move us out of the "present dark" and toward, in Stuelke's words, "worlds that break definitely with this one."