Repair: A New History

Abstract

It’s now twenty-five years since Eve Sedgwick put into question suspicion’s monopoly over the critical landscape with the first version of her essay, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’.1 Against the 1970s and 1980s ‘critical habits’ of paranoia and suspicion, Sedgwick proposed repair: an orientation and a tendency that involved pursuing not just relations between an abstracted subject and object, but also the modes of knowledge, and emotional experiences, of the particular subject involved in the critical relation: the ‘seeker, knower, or teller’.2 Reparative reading has had its critics, many of them writing in the vein of Lauren Berlant’s warning, in Cruel Optimism, against the ‘overvaluation of reparative thought’ as part of a ‘larger overvaluation of a certain mode of virtuously intentional, self-reflective personhood’.3 Nonetheless, Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair is written from a present-day context in which debates over repair’s value take as given that it has usurped suspicion as the dominant mode of US literary scholarship. Against what appears to be this naturalisation of repair, one of Stuelke’s central aims is to return us to the critical and political events of the 1970s and 1980s – the historical moment in which Sedgwick was developing her critique of paranoia – in order to understand the sea-change. The book’s five chapters attend to distinct scenes in which the critical tendency to repair coalesced with tendencies in activism, indicating the imbrication of each with the action and rhetoric of the state. These are: the US feminist sex wars; the black feminist imaginary of the Caribbean; Central American solidarity movements; the rise of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programmes; and the audio-sphere of the US invasion of Panama. From such concentrated moments of discourse, Stuelke sets out to illustrate that the reparative turn should be understood as responsive to and produced by the ideological landscape of neoliberalism and its affective episteme: its casting of ‘knowledge, self, and world in the language of emotion and feeling’.4