Tom’s Reviews > Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America > Status Update

‘Scenes repeat themselves: a white activist centres their guilt at a Black Lives Matter candlelight vigil, cisgender heterosexual allies complain of exclusion from lgbtq2s+. White fragility shatters: we refuse to wipe away their tears, and in alternative spaces, group messages and hidden social media groups, commiserate and strategise… everyday encounters with the sentimental apparatuses of oppression.’

‘Ambivalence of writing led Ling to speculate on Far’s ‘lesbian sensibility’, sparking widely accepted understanding of Far’s queerness. Much like the artificial silk flowers adored by the ornamental Chinese woman, Far the narcissus flower is an inorganic Oriental artifice in ways that complicate desires for transparency, authenticity, and scrutability for a sentimental Chinese woman writer.’

‘The figures of the coolie and the sex worker— identified by Shah as the two pathologised and sexually deviant counter parts integral to the Yellow Peril, manifest different gendered dimensions of Oriental inscrutability. The female Chinese sex worker was insincerely artificial, a heartlessness that I suggest is related to what Cheng calls the inorganic ornamentalist of the figure of the ‘yellow woman.’’

‘They are unfeeling, so custom-bound that even their tears are mere waters of ceremony, flowing forth at stated times,’ Far writes, citing Orientalist ethnographies of the Chinese in her “The Chinese in America” series (1909). ‘Thus a European traveller described the Chinese people, echoed by travellers and fiction writers since; you scarcely ever read about a Chinese person who is not a wooden peg’.’

‘Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion,’ James Baldwin wrote of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s paradigmatic protest novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), “is the mark of dishonesty. The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.’