The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics

A timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity's olfactory disparities. The Smell of Risk outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity's differentiated atmospheres as a subject worth sniffing out. From the industrial revolution to current-day environmental crises, Hsu uses ecocriticism, geography, and critical race studies to, for example, explore Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists' response to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the devastation settler colonialism has reaped on Indigenous smellscapes. In each instance, Hsu demonstrates the violence that air maintenance, control, and conditioning enacts on the poor and the marginalized. From nineteenth-century miasma theory theory to the synthetic chemicals that pervade twenty-first century air, Hsu takes smell at face value to offer an evocative retelling of urbanization, public health, and environmental violence.

About the Author :
Hsuan L. Hsu is Professor of English at the University of California Davis and the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization.

Review :
"Hsuan Hsu takes an exceptionally imaginative approach to the relationship between aesthetics and environmental justice. The Smell of Risk contributes significantly to the field of environmental humanities by exploring what has been a largely overlooked aspect of how we construct our environments and structure our social interactions. Hsu demonstrates the co-construction of 'race' and 'environment' as discursive technologies of state power and shows, in particular, how olfaction delineates the notion of an "environment" and its relation to the unequal distribution of risk. This deeply engaging and insightful work will change the way readers approach their olfactory senses." (Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative) "Hsu invites, in fact, urges us to think of olfactory perception beyond individual sensory experience or the well-established mnemonics in larger frames of decolonization, emancipation, liberation, as well as environmental 'slow violence.' The Smell of Risk may just make perceivers think, perceive, and feel differently. Hsu's study then is another significant step forward in the rapid evolution of the sense of smell as a critical tool of cultural analysis" - Hans J. Rindisbacher (American Literary History)