Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America

by Xine Yao

Overview

In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478022107
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2021
Series:	Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	787 KB

About the Author

Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Disaffected from the Culture of Sentiment  1
1. The Babo Problem: White Sentimentalism and Unsympathetic Blackness in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno  29
2. Feeling Otherwise: Martin R. Delany, Black-Indigenous Counterintimacies, and the Possibility of a New World  70
3. The Queer Frigidity of Professionalism: White Women Doctors, the Struggle for Rights, and the Marriage Plot  107
4. Objective Passionless: Black Women Doctors and Dispassionate Strategies of Uplifting Love  138
5. Oriental Inscrutability: Sui Sin Far, Chinese Faces, and the Modern Apparatuses of U.S. Immigration  171
Coda. Notes toward a Disaffected Manifesto beyond Survival  208
Notes  211
Bibliography  243
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is an excellent, thought-provoking monograph, which is sure to leave its mark on a wide range of disciplines and fields."

Jonathan D. S. Schroedern Literary History

Just when it seemed there could be nothing more to say about nineteenth-century sentimentalism, Xine Yao comes along with this powerhouse of a book. She exposes sentimentalism’s sly trick: a white supremacy exerted through an appearance of empathy that is actually the policing of feeling itself. Stunningly argued and refreshingly contrarian, Disaffected showcases what is most exciting about nineteenth-century American literary studies today while making important connections to emerging conversations in studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture - Britt Rusert

Against the affective economy in which white pain demands racialized consolation and white sympathy extorts racialized gratitude and emotional labor, Xine Yao’s original study examines ‘disaffection’ as a powerful practice that refuses the affective obligations of the nineteenth-century liberal social order. To be ‘disaffected’ is more than the absence of feeling—it is rather to feel otherwise, to refuse affective coercion, to stay with the negativity of unfeeling and to interrupt its rehabilitation, and more importantly, to invent counterpractices of sociality and care from below.

The Intimacies of Four Continents - Lisa Lowe

"One of the marvels of this book is how Yao allows ideas and images to resonate and return across her readings, even as she approaches each text on its own terms. . . . Yao’s broader achievement in Disaffected is to theorize and exemplify a disaffected reading practice that unsettles the assumptions inherited from the tradition of sentimentalism."

Leviathan - Nicholas Spengler

"Disaffected is a remarkable achievement that asks readers for 'reciprocity' in the 'mutual, uneven process of knowledge-making, meaning-making, community-building' that emerges from the withholdings and disclosures of unfeeling."

Synapsis - Benjamin Hulett

"The history of emotions has not seen the likes of this book before and its importance cannot be overstated. At the very least, the introductory chapter should make it on to every syllabus."

Emotions - Rob Boddice

"This is an excellent, thought-provoking monograph, which is sure to leave its mark on a wide range of disciplines and fields."--Jonathan D. S. Schroeder "American Literary History" (8/16/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"One of the marvels of this book is how Yao allows ideas and images to resonate and return across her readings, even as she approaches each text on its own terms. . . . Yao's broader achievement in Disaffected is to theorize and exemplify a disaffected reading practice that unsettles the assumptions inherited from the tradition of sentimentalism."--Nicholas Spengler "Leviathan" (3/3/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"The history of emotions has not seen the likes of this book before and its importance cannot be overstated. At the very least, the introductory chapter should make it on to every syllabus."--Rob Boddice "Emotions" (6/22/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Disaffected is a remarkable achievement that asks readers for 'reciprocity' in the 'mutual, uneven process of knowledge-making, meaning-making, community-building' that emerges from the withholdings and disclosures of unfeeling."--Benjamin Hulett "Synapsis" (12/22/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Against the affective economy in which white pain demands racialized consolation and white sympathy extorts racialized gratitude and emotional labor, Xine Yao's original study examines 'disaffection' as a powerful practice that refuses the affective obligations of the nineteenth-century liberal social order. To be 'disaffected' is more than the absence of feeling--it is rather to feel otherwise, to refuse affective coercion, to stay with the negativity of unfeeling and to interrupt its rehabilitation, and more importantly, to invent counterpractices of sociality and care from below."--Lisa Lowe, author of "The Intimacies of Four Continents"

"Just when it seemed there could be nothing more to say about nineteenth-century sentimentalism, Xine Yao comes along with this powerhouse of a book. She exposes sentimentalism's sly trick: a white supremacy exerted through an appearance of empathy that is actually the policing of feeling itself. Stunningly argued and refreshingly contrarian, Disaffected showcases what is most exciting about nineteenth-century American literary studies today while making important connections to emerging conversations in studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality."--Britt Rusert, author of "Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture"

From the Publisher