Building on what Lauren Berlant calls the “cruel optimism” of an always-withheld promise of belonging, this panel examines negative affects of resistance and refusal in Black and Indigenous literatures in the nineteenth century. The primacy placed on white “right feeling” represents what Derrick Bell, the father of Critical Race Theory, describes as a process of “interest convergence,” in which white feelings garner greater status in an endeavor to maintain white status, property, and values. As literary critic Xine Yao argues in her critique of the politics of sentimentalism, disaffection is a mode of “obstinancy” that “stubbornly contradict[s] the supposed universality of affects” and thereby interrupts the assimilative demands of liberal belonging (Disaffected, 2021). Where Yao emphasizes unfeeling as a protest against liberal politics, this panel considers how impermissible feelings like rage or revenge threaten the status quo by rejecting the conciliatory posture imagined by sympathetic recognition.

Our panel begins with Carrie Hyde’s paper, which unsettles the association between disinterestedness and justice by examining the politics of revenge in John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854). Despite its landmark status as the first novel published by a Native American, critics tend to interpret it through the lens of liberal individualism. The conceptual reliance on Anglo-American paradigms obscures the novel’s engagement with traditional Cherokee clan law, which identified revenge as a communal duty associated with kinship and balance. Ridge’s engagement with clan law illuminates the reparative aspirations and worldbuilding potential of vengeance.

Whereas Hyde focuses on vengeance, Daniel Couch’s essay examines Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and how the political affect of “democratic confusion” details antebellum racial anxieties. In Bird’s novel, the main character discovers he can move his consciousness into corpses and reanimate them, which he does six times. With each transformation Lee experiences confusion, yet Bird revels in the state’s democratic synthesis. Such celebratory transformations shift when Lee inhabits Tom, an enslaved man. As Tom, Lee instigates a confused, violent insurrection. Bird’s exploration of confusion thus limits its productive potentials to white agency. Functioning as positive and negative, confusion limns the affective affordances that demarcated racial difference.

Next, Jené Pledger turns to aural representation of rage and melancholy in William Apess. Reclaiming a suppressed voice for Indigenous peoples, Apess documents procedures by which expressing furious dissent can empower. Focusing on the Indian Nullification Act and “Eulogy on King Philip,” Pledger explores how Apess’s intellectual and activist labor for Indigenous sovereignty depended on modulating between an appearance of appeal to white sympathy and righteous rage. As a case study in the dialogic nature of early U.S. politics, Indian Nullification and “Eulogy on King Philip” challenge the notion of the voice as a powerful political tool by emphasizing its unreliable dependence on a sympathetic listening ear.

Finally, session organizer Will Clark briefly considers how the unequal mobilization of feelings limited white democratic political action. Discussing The Marrow of Tradition, Clark brings Charles Chesnutt’s realist-melodrama novel into conversation with Bell’s “interest convergence” theory of white investments in the law, and assesses a melodramatic contrast between the violence felt by Black citizens, and the interests of white property holders. By demonstrating how the novel showcases the limits of empathy to remedy the harm caused to Black citizens by their white counterparts, Clark excavates how bad feelings and a wish for vengeance illustrate the limits of political belonging.

With short papers on Indigenous, Black, and enslaved resistance by scholars across ranks and institutions, the panel revises accounts of the politics of “feeling good” by showing how writers used negative affects to critique and reimagine the scope of the U.S. nation state. The texts we consider mark inflexion points in U.S. literature and democratic thought. In light of the crisis of democracy in the present, we claim that the literary histories of these negative affects demand closer attention.