Deftly revisiting the assumed universality of human feeling, Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America asks how imperial modes of seeing have produced persistent tropes of racialized, gendered, and disabled illegibility. Responding to such illegibility, Yao develops the concept of unfeeling: a generative “range of affective modes, performances, moments, patterns, and practices” that can include “withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care, opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability” (11). Unfeeling poses a critical response to demands for legibility within relationships of power that center white feeling—whether white pain, pleasure, or sympathy. Unfeeling is therefore a practice of disaffection, which, following Martin F. Manalansan IV, is a form of disloyalty to white sentimental fantasies of universal sympathy across difference (1).

Thinking with unfeeling as a mode of disaffection, Yao asks how such fantasies of “universal feeling” are “a symptom and signifier of that coloniality” that has pathologized difference as something to be discarded in a eugenic logic, or rehabilitated in narratives of sympathetic white benevolence (4). The concept of unfeeling follows Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of affectability, which is a condition of global modernity wherein racialized bodies are made to be affectable—susceptible, impressible—to the white agential subject. Yao suggests that white sentimentalism implicitly categorizes bodies into the “affective (people who have agency over feeling and can act upon others) and the affectable (those whose feelings are reactive and susceptible to the affective” (38).

To theorize unfeeling, Yao attends to the literary and visual cultures of British empire, the transatlantic slave trade, and American settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. From Adam Smith’s more explicitly racist Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, white sentimentalism, Yao argues, has inscribed emotional expression as signifier of human interiority. Out of this interiority, white sentimentalism prescribes "true" or "right" feeling as the humane corrective to the inhumane injustices of modernity—all while perpetuating those very injustices by forgetting the violence of the human subject as racialized, gendered project of empire. The body itself is made readable in its perceived capacity to feel. Legibility, in this context, becomes a moral imperative, as it becomes shorthand for the capacity to embody organic humanity—and, in turn, the capacity to embody the ethical subject. Unfeeling, then, is “not simply” a theory of “negative feelings or the absence of feelings, but … that which cannot be recognized as feeling” to a white feeling public trained in seeing via imperial visual cultures (5).

Through five chapters alongside an introduction and coda, Yao theorizes four modes of unfeeling: unsympathetic Blackness, queer frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. The racialized and gendered distinctions of these chapters delineate a method of comparative racialization that is not, as Yao notes, about distilling race into taxonomies of feeling or uncomplicated solidarity. Rather, Yao emphasizes the ambivalence of “feeling somewhat” as a dimension of unfeeling wherein the affective labour of caring for others need not require knowability as a condition of relationality (97). Such ambivalence is perhaps the most exciting critical strength of Disaffected—it is precisely the indeterminacy of unfeeling that engenders forms of reciprocity and care not easily instrumentalized into narratives of progress.

In the first chapter, unsympathetic Blackness engenders critique around a politics of recognition that disciplines feeling through confluences in legal, scientific, aesthetic, and religious discourses. Reading Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Yao addresses the white sentimental romanticization of slavery which asserts that Black people find pleasure, even desire, in being enslaved under the natural law of white mastery. Babo, an enslaved Senegalese character, is able to facilitate revolt against the captain of the slave ship because the white narrator consistently reads his facial expressions as signs of devotion towards the captain. But where racial sciences, such as phrenology or physiognomy, turn faces and heads into readable objects of study, Babo’s remains are also rendered as such. In the novel’s later scene, Yao identifies, the body is turned into spectacle for a scopic politics of recognition that both criminalizes racialized bodies and racializes criminality. The desire for social life between the white captain and narrator, Yao argues, is fulfilled by their shared participation in Black death and abjection (64); unsympathetic Blackness is a refusal of sociality as such. This discussion of unsympathetic Blackness continues in chapter two, which reads the novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1861) by Black nationalist writer Martin R. Delany. The eponymous Blake, Yao suggests, reorients affective labour from white sentimental abolitionists to Black and Indigenous counterintimacies. Yet, as Yao suggests of Blake’s narrative, the suffering and affective and sexual labour of Black and Indigenous women continue to be disavowed not only for the sake of white feeling, but also within masculinist fantasies of collective revolution.

The third chapter distinguishes affection from desire through the concept of queer frigidity. Yao analyzes four nineteenth-century American novels featuring white, middle-class women doctors whose performance of detached medical professionalism affords them distance from heterosexual marriage plots: Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881) by William Dean Howell, Doctor Zay (1882) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, A Country Doctor (1884) by Sarah Orne Jewett, and Annie Nathan Meyer’s Helen Brent, M.D. (1892). Yao reads these novels alongside the development of anesthesia as both a somatic medical technology of emotional management and metaphorical resource for white women doctors to sublimate their political desires into their passion for their medical practice. Through such practices, Yao suggests that white feminist practices of unfeeling have appropriated narratives of subjection through slavery to aestheticize and realize their political desires for intimacy.    

In chapter four, Yao follows Darlene Clark Hine’s concept of dissemblance: a strategic self-fashioning by Black women who maintain an image of openness and transparency to shield, and cultivate, their psychic lives from anti-Black scrutiny and the threat of sexual violence. While the increasingly professionalized field of medicine in the nineteenth century valorized dispassionate objectivity in order to distance itself from Indigenous folk, and other supposedly illegitimate medicine (Yao 115), objective passionlessness, Yao emphasizes, is practiced by Black women doctors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca J. Cole, and Rebecca Lee Davis Crumpler. These figures, Yao asserts, generatively situate the abolition of slavery and prisons as matters of public health. Black objective passionlessness therefore indexes the ways in which, as C. Riley Snorton notes, gendered embodiment for trans and cis people alike is affirmed by the degendering of Black women through enfleshment (Yao 144). Sexologist Havelock Ellis’ pathologization of Black women as cold and insensible to the civilizing refinements of love, Yao suggests, further illustrates how white feeling produces a racialized, gendered mode of reading disaffection itself.

Chapter five focuses on Oriental inscrutability to critique the conflation of access and desire with intimacy. Yao considers how the literary use of habitual repetition in stories and journalism by Sui Sin Far (the pen name for mixed race writer Edith Maude Eaton) stylistically marks the exhaustion of being scrutinized within “coercive social intimacies” (200). Through the figure of the coolie (a tireless labouring machine) and the sex worker (whose inorganicity is masked by hyperfeminized ornamental excess), the inexpressive face is pathologized as an Asiatic racial form subject to eugenic concerns about moral impressibility. Oriental inscrutability therefore complicates the association between expression and feeling. The opacity of ornamentalism, particularly, produces an interface for both disclosure and withholding as a femme practice of sociality.

The chapters of Disaffected are bookended with a coda to close the book, and an acknowledgements section to open it. In the acknowledgements, Yao foregrounds loved ones who create “the conditions of possibility for finishing [the] book … staying alive” and therefore transform “weary expressions of refusals to care” into “collective care” (vii and ix). Meanwhile, the coda’s very title proposes “a disaffected manifesto beyond survival” (Yao 209). These sections animate Yao’s investment in creating space to dwell in dissatisfaction, attending to the particular abjection of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour whose affective labour has not been reciprocated.

Disaffected is enabled by, and will contribute to, scholarship in critical Black studies, affect theory, queer of colour theory, and postcoloniality among other discourses. Simultaneously, this book speaks to critical refugee studies, critical disability studies, discourses of techno-Orientialism, and surveillance studies. Given that Yao’s turn to “unfeeling as theory in the flesh” follows Hortense Spillers’ germinal discourse of Black enfleshment and draws from Audre Lorde, I wonder: how might we theorize the erotics of unfeeling? How might such erotics register the “affective fleshiness” assigned to Blackness while refiguring “questions of sovereign subjectivity and desire” within “epistemologies rooted in opacity and sensuality” (Musser 9)? Could the erotics of unfeeling register the Black feminist possibilities of feelin that, in Bettina Judd’s language, involves emotions that are not yet named? The feeling of unfeeling, as it were, is made possible in the queer femininity of Black women maintaining self-images of transparent disclosure; the transformation of inscrutability into interface by Orientalized bodies; and the reorientation of affective labour towards Black and Indigenous counterintimacies. Such practices complicate desires for care to materialize through universal feeling. If unfeeling enables relearning around multiple “vocabularies of affective expression” (Yao 184), Disaffected is an invitation to refigure practices of care work through unfeeling’s very ambivalence.

Notes

1. Yao’s suggestion that not all feelings are made to matter recalls, to me, Simone Browne’s theorization of dark matter to think with Blackness. For Browne, Blackness has been made into a mode of materiality that is used to  produce a viewing public that is trained in translating sensorial embodiments into legible visual cultures. To conceive of feeling as matter, in this sense, surfaces the ways in which the modern feeling subject has been made possible through the subjection of Blackness to “black matter(s),” where “the black body is the quintessential sign for subjection” (Holland 4) and abject erotics. See Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke UP, 2015) and Holland in Works Cited.

2. While unfeeling articulates the ways in which care work is a mode of knowledge production, it also surfaces how the body itself can be a technology of violence believed to be care. The feminized white frigidity and Black objective passionlessness that Yao discusses in chapters three and four, read alongside chapter five’s references to techno-Orientalism, highlight the nuances around unfeeling as an aesthetic and strategy of “psychic survival” (Yao 17) also developed in the late Y-Dang Troeung’s writing on refugee aphasia as a condition that indexes the genealogies of imperial war, mean while exceeding the conflation of speech with subjectivity. Instead, Troeung turns to the contours of silence to critique imperial war as a technology for producing the legible, and grievable, human subjectivity. See Troeung’s work in critical refugee and critical disability studies in Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple UP, 2023).

3. See Bettina Judd, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern UP, 2022).