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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Xine Yao, "Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America" (Duke UP, 2021)
Description: What is unfeeling? According to todayâs guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes âa broad range of affective modes, including 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.â In short, Xine argues in a new book from Duke University Press, titled Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, âpeople who are disaffected break from affectability and present themselves as unaffectedâ (11). Xine is a Lecturer of English before 1900 at University College London. Xine is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation T...