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

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

Author: Xine Yao
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 11/12/2021
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN13: 9781478014836
ISBN10: 1478014830
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | General
- Literary Criticism | American | General

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