Sentimental Cultures, Political Fantasy, and Unfeeling

  1. Paula Barba Guerrero 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Salamanca
    info

    Universidad de Salamanca

    Salamanca, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02f40zc51

Journal:
Moveable Type: Unfeeling

ISSN: 1755-4527

Year of publication: 2022

Volume: 14

Issue: 1

Pages: 1-10

Type: Book review

DOI: 10.14324/111.1755-4527.140 GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Moveable Type: Unfeeling

Abstract

Amidst a growing scholarly interest in cultural representations of emotion, Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America offers a fresh perspective on the role of affect and its historical use. Disaffected persuasively investigates the implicit violence of white sentimentalism, insisting on its inextricable connection to dominant power structures. Yao posits affect as crisscrossed by ideology, delineating a distinct coloniality of emotion and exchange that results in proper feelings or expectable emotional reactions marked by one’s gender, sexuality, and race. Yao’s monograph critiques these impositions, turning instead to reappraise the concept of ‘unfeeling’ in nineteenth-century America.