‘Sentimental Cultures, Political Fantasy, and Unfeeling’

Amidst a growing scholarly interest in cultural representations of emotion, Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America offers a fresh perspective on the role of affect and its historical use. Disaffected persuasively investigates the implicit violence of white sentimentalism, insisting on its inextricable connection to dominant power structures. Yao posits affect as crisscrossed by ideology, delineating a distinct coloniality of emotion and exchange that results in proper feelings or expectable emotional reactions marked by one’s gender, sexuality, and race. Yao’s monograph critiques these impositions, turning instead to reappraise the concept of ‘unfeeling’ in nineteenth-century America.