Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America

Centre for the Study of North America

Guest lecture by Dr Xine Yao

Yao's talk, based on her recent book, 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.  Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, 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.