none 10.1215/9781478022107 Duke University Press Duke University Press 73 130405522 3897770 2021092220274301000 10.1215 2021-09-22T16:35:53Z 2021-09-22T16:35:51Z 6 10.1515/9781478022107 Xine Yao 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 10 15 2021 978-1-4780-2210-7 Duke University Press Co-Access 10.2307/j.ctv1x8b831 10.1215/9781478022107 http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2952/DisaffectedThe-Cultural-Politics-of-Unfeeling-in