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 Denise Wong (bio) Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Xine Yao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Ix + 291 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1483-6. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America marks an exciting turn in affect studies towards the radical affordances of unfeeling as a tactic of resistance. Xine Yao's debut monograph moves critical discussion beyond "the stifling imperatives of the political stakes of sympathy" to uncover "what we can apprehend" by "stay[ing] with the negativity of unfeeling and [End Page 105] suspend[ing] its rehabilitation" (3). Disaffection is both negative feeling and the negation of feeling as resistance but neither resolved nor subsumed by discourses of overcoming. It is a mode for understanding the extent to which cultural fantasies of justice and social change are contingent upon a politics of recognition and sympathy. Yao contends that the Western liberal project of inclusion demands sympathetic recognition and, though seemingly innocuous, presumes a false universality masking an insidious disparity between who gets to retain their subject status while refusing to feel. One of Yao's most generative provocations is her reading of sympathetic recognition as a colonial legacy originating in the culture of sentiment advanced by Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). She identifies four modes of disaffected unfeeling "in the cultural imagination deployed to flatten out and invalidate individual and collective subtleties" (6): unsympathetic Blackness, queer frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. Although Disaffected is concerned with how American literature and culture understands affect and politics, a paradigm with a disproportionately global impact, the scope of Yao's framework extends far beyond the geographic and historical specificity of her corpus which focuses on nineteenth-century fiction that "question[s] the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The primary texts include Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), Martin R. Delany's Blake; or the Huts of America (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Edith Maude Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). These writers "use the space of fiction to question the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The first two chapters explore unsympathetic Blackness as a mode of dissent from two contexts. In the first, the novella Benito Cereno illustrates how the false universality of white sentimentalism ensures that Babo, Melville's Senegalese slave-turned-rebel leader, remains an illegible and thus contemptible subject. Following philosophers Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter, Yao argues this falsely universal discourse of sentimentality is predicated upon racialised politics of recognition. In the second, Martin R. Delany's eponymous protagonist Blake rejects dominant white modes of feeling but, instead of being executed as an act of justice, he forms an alliance with the Indigenous community "to unmake the structural conditions of Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession that produce the modern world" (23). Borrowing Tiffany King's formulation, Yao reads "convergence without conflation" (73) in the way Blake "disrupt[s] the colonial dichotomization of Blackness and Indigeneity as antagonistic to each other" (77) by thinking through the historical and theoretical intersections of Black emancipation and Indigenous sovereignty. [End Page 106] The third chapter reads queer frigidity as a consequence of white middleclass women's entry into the medical profession. Yao takes Phelps's Doctor Zay as an example amidst a cluster of late nineteenth-century American novels which use the marriage plot to stage debates about the correlation between love and political desire for suffrage and other rights. The expectation for women to reappropriate "the masculinized authority of medical science's disciplinary detachment" (112) juxtaposes "the coercive affective imperatives of marriage and family" (25). Yao focuses compellingly on the homology between the invention of anaesthesia and the pathologisation and queering of female frigidity (diagnosed by sexologist Havelock Ellis as "a medical condition prevalent among women" [114]). Anaesthesia as a mechanism of controlled unfeeling for professional advancement parallels "the alleged abnormality of frigidity" (115) in the way detachment signifies agency...