Exploring the power of smell to build connections and transform our world

Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.

Hsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilize scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably livable worlds.

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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781517921231
Publisert
2026-02-19
Utgiver
University of Minnesota Press
Vekt
113 gr
Høyde
178 mm
Bredde
127 mm
Dybde
7 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
134

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

Hsuan L. Hsu is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature; Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization; The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics; and Air Conditioning.