2021 Robert K. Martin Book Prize winner
2022 Arthur Miller First Book Prize honorable mention
2022 shortlist University English Book Prize
A01=Xine Yao
Author_Xine Yao
British Association of American Studies book awards
Canadian Association for American Studies book award winners
Category=DS
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTB
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University English Book Prize
Product details
- ISBN 9781478014836
- Weight: 431g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 Nov 2021
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Disaffected Xine Yao 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. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. 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 color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London.
