Disaffected

The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America

Xine Yao

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781478014836
  9781478013891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478022107
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

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

Table of contents

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