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.

"“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.”" - 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.”" - 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." - ALH