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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao Nicholas Spengler XINE YAO Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. ix + 304 pp. In his once obscure but now oft-cited study of Melville, C. L. R. James identifies Babo, the Black rebel leader of “Benito Cereno” (1855), as “the most heroic character in Melville’s fiction . . . a man of unbending will . . . a man of internal power” (Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001. p. 112). Roughly seven decades after James penned these words from a detention center on Ellis Island, Xine Yao has given us a language and a framework for understanding such “internal power” not just as perseverance or intelligence but also as “disaffection” and “unfeeling”: a cultivated and calculated withdrawal from the dubious benefits of white sympathies and from the imperative to be affectively recognizable and responsive as a prerequisite to inclusion within the Western model of “universal” humanity. In lieu of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental model of “feeling right” as the affective engine for social justice, Yao proposes the disaffected model of “feeling otherwise” (6) to imagine alternative and insurgent forms of relation and political belonging. To this end, Yao moves beyond what she calls the “deracinated universality” (9) of Affect Studies itself, drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and queer of color scholars as theorists of feeling overlooked by the discipline. Yao’s heroic characters emerge from a varied assemblage of American texts of the long nineteenth century: they are revolutionary figures of “unsym-pathetic Blackness,” such as Babo and Henry Blake, from Martin Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1861); they are white women doctors manifesting “queer frigidity” in novels such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882); they are Black women medical professionals marked by “Black objective passionlessness” like the titular heroine of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892); and they are figures of “Oriental inscrutability” in the writings of Sui Sin Far, including her collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). While these categories are pejorative stereotypes from the perspective of white [End Page 44] sentimentalism and universalist humanism, Yao’s readings show how these characters (and, in many cases, their authors) reclaim apparently negative affects as strategic tools through which to insulate themselves from and even rebel against the racialized and gendered hierarchies that rely on these apparently comprehensive modes of thinking, feeling, and being. “These antisocial affects may be perceived as such only because their insurgent potential offers a way out of dominant ways of being and enabling new structures of feeling to arise” (12), Yao writes. To be “disaffected” or “unfeeling,” then, is not to be affectless but rather to refuse a subordinate position in existing sentimental hierarchies. As Yao puts it in her reading of “Benito Cereno”: “The corollary to the uncivilized reactive feelings attributed to racialized and colonized peoples is the paradoxical fear of their affective agency: the fear that, like Babo and his people, underneath the appearance of affectability they might be unfeelingly disaffected from the biopolitics of feeling” (52). What unites these figures is not a coherent or uniform theory of insurgent affect across different marginalized groups but rather Yao’s use of “unfeeling” to describe “a range of affective modes, performances, moments, patterns, and practices that fall outside of or are not legible using dominant regimes of expression” (11). These modes vary widely based on the lived experiences of their practitioners–some are carefully guarded while others are overtly insurrectionary, some translate readily into political action while others are stubbornly “counteractive”–but as Yao points out this variety is “a methodological strength” since “their unruly and difficult convergences resist the homogenizing discourse of universal feeling” (28). Such convergences mark a shift away from “colonial intimacies” (15)–the racialized affective hierarchy instantiated by the white New Englander Delano’s description of the enslaved Babo as a “faithful fellow” and “friend” (NN Piazza Tales 57) to the Spanish (American) Cereno–to what Yao calls “counterintimacies” (15), alternative affinities both within and across marginalized groups, such...