Infectious Feelings: Sentimental Aesthetics in the Age of the Yellow Peril

Abstract

“Infectious Feelings: Sentimental Aesthetics in the Age of the Yellow Peril” explores the cyclical relationship between white supremacy, affect, and race science in the Gilded Age/Progressive Era United States. It foregrounds the ways in which sentimental culture has served Western liberalism’s colonial idea of the human, and the consequent oppression of racialized subjects. This relationship is observed through the lens of the Yellow Peril discourse, which actively employed race science and its understanding of affect to empower the ideology of white supremacy as a racist settler state governmentality. “Infectious Feelings” analyzes the affective responses of women writers of color to the Yellow Perilist race discourse and teases out the discursive connections that emerge from their affective movements under racial colonialism. It comparatively analyzes works written by Chinese, Californiana, Black, and Yankton Dakota writers who wrote in the Yellow Perilist United States and therefore witnessed the national culture’s obsession with race scientific explanations about which bodies are sentimental and thus belong to the modern nation’s future. These works include Sui Sin Far’s “Woo-Ma and I” (1906), and “Away Down in Jamaica” (1898); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885); Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted (1892); and Zitkala-Ša’s semi-autobiographical Atlantic Monthly series (1900). Through a historicist approach, “Infectious Feelings” demonstrates that the race scientific thinking of bodies and sentiments served as a frame for literary sentimentalism in the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. The messy, discursive, and yet shared observations on the body-sentimentality connection delineate these authors’ affective practices of resistance against racist colonialism. This study concludes that the writers of color, even when they were not intentionally working in coalition, unevenly disrupt the Yellow Peril discourse and its race scientific iconography of the “Asiatic.” Their discursive disruption of the colonial sentimental culture problematizes the Yellow Perilist race order by exposing and refusing the sentimentalist definition of what counts as the human. “Infectious Feelings,” in brief, thinks of how racialized subjects can depart from the world that makes them incommensurable and imagines a step toward cross-racial solidarity.