Description
Book SynopsisIn
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 stra
Trade Review“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 *
“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 *
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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 *
"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 *
"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 *
"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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
