Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century

This paper will be drawn from Xine's book, Disaffected, in which they explore 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. 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 colour to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility.

Xine Yao hails from Toronto, Canada (B.A. Trinity College at the University of Toronto, M.A. Dalhousie University, M.A. Cornell University, Ph.D. Cornell University). She joined UCL in 2018 as Lecturer in American Literature in English to 1900. Xine is co-director of qUCL. Xine is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She serves on the Executive Committee of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists as a Member-at Large. For 2021-2024 she represents the LLC 19th-Century American Forum to the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association. She is the co-host of PhDivas, a podcast about academia, culture, and social justice across the STEM/humanities divide. Xine is the founding chair of the podcast initiative for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 

Contact: alexandra.kingston-reese@york.ac.uk