Reparative Reading and the Drug Wars’ Queer Children

Abstract

This article posits that recent reparative responses to the opioid crisis are consistent with a longer history of reparative hermeneutics conditioned by the drug wars in the Americas, ones that attempt to repair but often reinforce the biopolitical logics produced by the artificial divide between licit and illicit drugs, a distinction that facilitates both racial and imperialist policing and racial capitalist profiteering. The humanities’ postcritical reorientation, and particularly the turn toward the reparative, is underwritten by such relations between state, capital, and drug policy. To investigate the reverberations of such contemporary political and academic investments in drug-war-fueled repair, the article focuses on a recent wave of black fiction and film that reenvisions the 1980s War on Drugs in the era of the opioid epidemic, with particular attention to Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016) and James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods (2015).