This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

Dinah Craik’s 1851 novella The Half-Caste tells the story of how a half-Indian heiress, Zillah Le Poer, faces manipulative attempts by the greedy British side of her family to control her fortune which she thwarts by marrying her older Scottish guardian. This reading of Craik’s novel examines the production of race at a period when dominant British imperialism was believed to depend largely on hierarchies of race allegedly constructed by heredity. Walters argues that Craik describes how new racial identities can be produced by the ‘affective capacity of brown, Eurasian, female bodies to feel connection with – and dependence on white women’, with resulting implications for racial hierarchies and Empire itself. The chapter examines the idea of race in part as a function of feeling and reveals a ‘slippage between affective and racially scientific methods of assessing difference’.

Catherine Peters discusses how writers such as the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reworked the Romantic trope of the revolutionary “common wind” to forge kinship networks among forcibly displaced peoples. In formulating this argument, Peters shifts the conventional focus on the French Revolution as the hub of radical Romantic thought to the Haitian Revolution, where “fraternité” refers not to an abstract ideal but a very real desire to reconstitute those family relations disrupted by the institution of slavery.

This chapter focuses on emotions and affects in Greek epic. Leven demarcates the difference between emotion and affect in this context: emotions are defined as complex phenomena that involve embodied minds, gendered individuals and their societies, as well as instincts, cognition and values; and affects are understood as more ineffable feelings, which lie ‘beneath’ the surface: the innumerable microevents that bodies and selves undergo in their experience of the world around them, rarely indexed in conventional language. The chapter then starts by outlining the main questions that have divided scholarship on ancient emotions in general, and epic emotions in particular, with special focus on two cases, anger and fear. It then turns to episodes featuring what Leven calls ‘scenes of affect’ and argues, first, that epic is not in fact solely dominated by ‘big emotions’ but is rather shaped by a multitude of affects. Focusing on representative passages of the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Posthomerica, the chapter ultimately shows that epic provides its own tools to conceptualise these affects.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

This book considers professional culture in relation to place and affect. All law students from across Britain and its empire had to train in London at four legal societies known as the Inns of Court. Unlike other professions that underwent systematic reforms, the Inns of Court remained guild-like associations that offered no systematic training. Instead of inculcating legal knowledge, the societies relied on affective rituals to create a sense of belonging among members—or, conversely, to marginalize those who did not fit the profession’s ideals. This book examines the societies’ active efforts to maintain an exclusive and masculine culture in the face of sweeping social, political, and demographic changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter examines how, particularly in response to their growing middle-class population, the Inns of Court relied on their architectural spaces and social practices to ensure that all members of the bar embodied the ideal of the gentlemanly professional. In the absence of required classes, the societies stressed fraternization with older generations to inculcate new members with legal knowledge and the values appropriate to British barristers. The societies emphasized affective bonds and tried to cultivate fraternal relationships between their members. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the category of gentlemanliness was itself in flux, subject to divergent ideas of who could be a gentleman and how a gentleman should behave. Competing ideas of who belonged at the societies or what counted as gentlemanly behavior could result in unanticipated affective registers, including anger, indignation, and shame.