Hsuan L Hsu
Biographic Data
| ID | 789133 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hsuan L Hsu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hsuan L |
| FAMILY NAME | Hsu |
| SIGNATURE | HSU H L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0069-1898 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Redistributions of the Sensible: "An Introduction to "Senses with/out Subjects
avia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, touch, chemosensation, and sensitivity to DNA itself offer a basis for building kinship relations that stretch across both species and interplanetar y boundaries.In Dawn (1987), for instance, surviving a planetary apocalypse and centuries of racial capitalist violence and war making requires the reeducation of the senses.When she wakes up on a spaceship after nuclear war has made most of Earth uninhabitable, the…
Introduction: The Molecular Intimacies of Empire
Special Forum Editors
The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez
A conversation with the artists Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez, whose work reckons with the imperial and colonial histories that underlie conventional materials of art and aesthetic experience. Glow and Rodriguez share insights about their artistic processes, their experiments with pigment-making, scent production, field research, and collaboration, and how they have reflected on and enacted alternatives to the transnational sourcing of pigmen…
Smell, History, and Heritage
Journal Article Smell, History, and Heritage Get access William Tullett, William Tullett Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Inger Leemans, Inger Leemans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Hsuan Hsu, Hsuan Hsu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Stephanie Weismann, Stephanie Weismann Search for other wor…
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, s…
Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
The Smell of Risk considers the capacities of olfaction as a tool for sensing and staging modernity’s differentiated atmospheres and their associated environmental risks. Focusing on American literature and art from the 1890s to the present, the book considers how smell stages the pathways through which environmental materials enter and interact with bodies in detective fiction, naturalist novels, environmental illness memoirs, environmental just…
Naturalist Compulsion, Racial Divides, and the Time-Loop Zombie
This paper develops a dialogue between two lines of inquiry: on the one hand, Jennifer Fleissner’s groundbreaking reading of literary naturalism in terms of compulsive, repetitive gestures stuck in historical time; on the other hand, the recent special issue of Studies in Literary Naturalism on the topic of “Naturalism and Science Fiction.” Focusing on naturalism’s intersections with dystopian science fiction, this essay considers the transformed…
Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation
Excerpt from Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi
Boris Raux, olfactory narcissism, and environmental risk
This article develops the concept of “olfactory narcissism” through an analysis of Boris Raux’s multi-media artworks. Approaching narcissism through the sense of smell, Raux frames the self in insistently material, trans-corporeal terms. His olfactory projects thus explore questions about the porous self and the ethical and environmental stakes of “deodorization” and olfactory self-fashioning. The paper explores how olfactory aesthetics can contr…
Literature Across Scales
This chapter provides an overview of how cultural geographers and literary critics theorize interactions between different scales. It demonstrates how scale – despite its provisional and constructed nature – offers some measure of epistemological and social stability amid racial capitalism's shifting waves of "creative destruction". The tension between cosmopolitan connectedness and diverse modes of structural and spatial violence can best be und…
Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice
This essay considers naturalist and neonaturalist deployments of smell as a means of mapping uneven and potentially toxic atmospheres in the contexts of Progressive Era urbanization and twentieth-century environmental “slow violence.” After showing how the description of noxious “smellscapes” structures Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), I move on to consider the use of smell in key scenes in the writings of Ann Petry and Helena Viramontes. …
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible
Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment
Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment Hsuan L. Hsu (bio) Perhaps the most widely publicized work of airborne, trans-corporeal art was an unintentional one. In 2010 Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds—a vast expanse of almost 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds ironically commissioned by the hygienic product corporation Unilever—was deemed too toxic for visitors to touch. Although it was designed to be an interactive in…
Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice
Research Article| March 01 2014 Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice Hsuan L. Hsu Hsuan L. Hsu University of California, Davis [email protected] Hsuan L. Hsu is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Davis. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and has edited the Broadview edition of Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance and (with Martin B…
Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. John Blair Gamber
Journal Article Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. John Blair Gamber. Get access Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. John Blair Gamber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 248 pages. $50.00 cloth. Hsuan L. Hsu Hsuan L. Hsu University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: Oxf…
The Semblance Of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation In Asian American Literature. By Christopher Lee
Circa 1898: Overseas Empire and Transnational American Studies
Although it dates back to the nation's "messy beginnings," 1 US imperialism intensified around 1898, with the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), the Spanish-American War of 1898, the annexation of Hawai'i (1898), the bloody US-Philippine War (1899-1902), the China Relief Expedition in which US troops participated in 1900-1901, diplomatic interventions that set the stage for the Panama Canal, and economic support for the tyrannical regime of Porfiri…
Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice
Fatal Contiguities" considers the roles of metaphor and metonymy in novels that represent environmental injustices. Focusing on Helena María Viramontes's depiction of East L.A. during the time of freeway construction in Their Dogs Came With Them , this essay suggests that metonymy, which works along the linguistic axis of contiguity, is especially effective in making visible the fatal contiguities between bodies and their surroundings characteris…
Mika Rottenberg's Productive Bodies
Hsuan L. Hsu is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis. His essays on film and contemporary media have appeared in Jump Cut, Film Criticism, Discourse, and Daedalus. His book Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press
Health media & global inequalities
Vagrancy and Comparative Racialization in Huckleberry Finn and “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”
Hsu's essay argues that the racially differentiated experiences of mobility depicted in Huckleberry Finn are informed by a range of vagrancy laws that restricted access to public spaces. Such legal constraints on mobility were deployed throughout the South and West to control the mobility of African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Post-Reconstruction practices such as convict lease and the enforcement of vagrancy laws help ac…
Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics
Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation
Introduction:Race, Environment, and Representation Mark B. Feldman (bio) and Hsuan L. Hsu (bio) In his preface to The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell writes, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the great public issue of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. In the century just begun, that problem shows no sign of abating. But ultimately a still more pressing question may prove to be whether planetary life wil…
Personality, Race, and Geopolitics in Joseph Heco's Narrative of a Japanese
Joseph Heco, a Japanese castaway who spent the 1850s working and studying in the US, played a significant role as translator, entrepreneur, and advisor after returning to Japan. This article examines the circum-Pacific contexts and stylistic idiosyncrasies of Heco's autobiographical Narrative of a Japanese, arguing that its formal flaws reflect disjunctions between the conventions of equality that underwrite Western autobiography and the uneven c…
The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
The Smell of Risk considers the capacities of olfaction as a tool for sensing and staging modernity’s differentiated atmospheres and their associated environmental risks. Focusing on American literature and art from the 1890s to the present, the book considers how smell stages the pathways through which environmental materials enter and interact with bodies in detective fiction, naturalist novels, environmental illness memoirs, environmental just…
Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice
Fatal Contiguities" considers the roles of metaphor and metonymy in novels that represent environmental injustices. Focusing on Helena María Viramontes's depiction of East L.A. during the time of freeway construction in Their Dogs Came With Them , this essay suggests that metonymy, which works along the linguistic axis of contiguity, is especially effective in making visible the fatal contiguities between bodies and their surroundings characteris…
Redistributions of the Sensible: "An Introduction to "Senses with/out Subjects
avia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, touch, chemosensation, and sensitivity to DNA itself offer a basis for building kinship relations that stretch across both species and interplanetar y boundaries.In Dawn (1987), for instance, surviving a planetary apocalypse and centuries of racial capitalist violence and war making requires the reeducation of the senses.When she wakes up on a spaceship after nuclear war has made most of Earth uninhabitable, the…
Smell, History, and Heritage
Journal Article Smell, History, and Heritage Get access William Tullett, William Tullett Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Inger Leemans, Inger Leemans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Hsuan Hsu, Hsuan Hsu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Stephanie Weismann, Stephanie Weismann Search for other wor…
Boris Raux, olfactory narcissism, and environmental risk
This article develops the concept of “olfactory narcissism” through an analysis of Boris Raux’s multi-media artworks. Approaching narcissism through the sense of smell, Raux frames the self in insistently material, trans-corporeal terms. His olfactory projects thus explore questions about the porous self and the ethical and environmental stakes of “deodorization” and olfactory self-fashioning. The paper explores how olfactory aesthetics can contr…
Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice
This essay considers naturalist and neonaturalist deployments of smell as a means of mapping uneven and potentially toxic atmospheres in the contexts of Progressive Era urbanization and twentieth-century environmental “slow violence.” After showing how the description of noxious “smellscapes” structures Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), I move on to consider the use of smell in key scenes in the writings of Ann Petry and Helena Viramontes. …
Introduction: The Molecular Intimacies of Empire
Special Forum Editors
The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez
A conversation with the artists Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez, whose work reckons with the imperial and colonial histories that underlie conventional materials of art and aesthetic experience. Glow and Rodriguez share insights about their artistic processes, their experiments with pigment-making, scent production, field research, and collaboration, and how they have reflected on and enacted alternatives to the transnational sourcing of pigmen…
Naturalist Compulsion, Racial Divides, and the Time-Loop Zombie
This paper develops a dialogue between two lines of inquiry: on the one hand, Jennifer Fleissner’s groundbreaking reading of literary naturalism in terms of compulsive, repetitive gestures stuck in historical time; on the other hand, the recent special issue of Studies in Literary Naturalism on the topic of “Naturalism and Science Fiction.” Focusing on naturalism’s intersections with dystopian science fiction, this essay considers the transformed…
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible
Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment
Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment Hsuan L. Hsu (bio) Perhaps the most widely publicized work of airborne, trans-corporeal art was an unintentional one. In 2010 Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds—a vast expanse of almost 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds ironically commissioned by the hygienic product corporation Unilever—was deemed too toxic for visitors to touch. Although it was designed to be an interactive in…
Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation
Introduction:Race, Environment, and Representation Mark B. Feldman (bio) and Hsuan L. Hsu (bio) In his preface to The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell writes, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the great public issue of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. In the century just begun, that problem shows no sign of abating. But ultimately a still more pressing question may prove to be whether planetary life wil…
Worlding the Archive
American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865. By Bruce A. Harvey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 331 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). JUDGING BY ITS TITLE, AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICS SEEMS TO FIT RIGHT INTO THE BY now familiar catalogue of conferences, critical works, and special journal issues concerned with "worlding," "globalizing," or at least "post-nationalizing" Ameri…
Worlding the Archive
American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865. By Bruce A. Harvey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 331 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). JUDGING BY ITS TITLE, AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICS SEEMS TO FIT RIGHT INTO THE BY now familiar catalogue of conferences, critical works, and special journal issues concerned with "worlding," "globalizing," or at least "post-nationalizing" Ameri…
Personality, Race, and Geopolitics in Joseph Heco's Narrative of a Japanese
Joseph Heco, a Japanese castaway who spent the 1850s working and studying in the US, played a significant role as translator, entrepreneur, and advisor after returning to Japan. This article examines the circum-Pacific contexts and stylistic idiosyncrasies of Heco's autobiographical Narrative of a Japanese, arguing that its formal flaws reflect disjunctions between the conventions of equality that underwrite Western autobiography and the uneven c…
Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation
Introduction:Race, Environment, and Representation Mark B. Feldman (bio) and Hsuan L. Hsu (bio) In his preface to The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell writes, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the great public issue of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. In the century just begun, that problem shows no sign of abating. But ultimately a still more pressing question may prove to be whether planetary life wil…
Health media & global inequalities
Vagrancy and Comparative Racialization in Huckleberry Finn and “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”
Hsu's essay argues that the racially differentiated experiences of mobility depicted in Huckleberry Finn are informed by a range of vagrancy laws that restricted access to public spaces. Such legal constraints on mobility were deployed throughout the South and West to control the mobility of African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Post-Reconstruction practices such as convict lease and the enforcement of vagrancy laws help ac…
Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics
Mika Rottenberg's Productive Bodies
Hsuan L. Hsu is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis. His essays on film and contemporary media have appeared in Jump Cut, Film Criticism, Discourse, and Daedalus. His book Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press
Circa 1898: Overseas Empire and Transnational American Studies
Although it dates back to the nation's "messy beginnings," 1 US imperialism intensified around 1898, with the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), the Spanish-American War of 1898, the annexation of Hawai'i (1898), the bloody US-Philippine War (1899-1902), the China Relief Expedition in which US troops participated in 1900-1901, diplomatic interventions that set the stage for the Panama Canal, and economic support for the tyrannical regime of Porfiri…
Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice
Fatal Contiguities" considers the roles of metaphor and metonymy in novels that represent environmental injustices. Focusing on Helena María Viramontes's depiction of East L.A. during the time of freeway construction in Their Dogs Came With Them , this essay suggests that metonymy, which works along the linguistic axis of contiguity, is especially effective in making visible the fatal contiguities between bodies and their surroundings characteris…
The Semblance Of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation In Asian American Literature. By Christopher Lee
Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. John Blair Gamber
Journal Article Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. John Blair Gamber. Get access Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. John Blair Gamber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 248 pages. $50.00 cloth. Hsuan L. Hsu Hsuan L. Hsu University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: Oxf…
Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice
Research Article| March 01 2014 Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice Hsuan L. Hsu Hsuan L. Hsu University of California, Davis [email protected] Hsuan L. Hsu is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Davis. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and has edited the Broadview edition of Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance and (with Martin B…
Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice
This essay considers naturalist and neonaturalist deployments of smell as a means of mapping uneven and potentially toxic atmospheres in the contexts of Progressive Era urbanization and twentieth-century environmental “slow violence.” After showing how the description of noxious “smellscapes” structures Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), I move on to consider the use of smell in key scenes in the writings of Ann Petry and Helena Viramontes. …
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible
Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment
Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment Hsuan L. Hsu (bio) Perhaps the most widely publicized work of airborne, trans-corporeal art was an unintentional one. In 2010 Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds—a vast expanse of almost 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds ironically commissioned by the hygienic product corporation Unilever—was deemed too toxic for visitors to touch. Although it was designed to be an interactive in…
Literature Across Scales
This chapter provides an overview of how cultural geographers and literary critics theorize interactions between different scales. It demonstrates how scale – despite its provisional and constructed nature – offers some measure of epistemological and social stability amid racial capitalism's shifting waves of "creative destruction". The tension between cosmopolitan connectedness and diverse modes of structural and spatial violence can best be und…
Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation
Excerpt from Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi
Boris Raux, olfactory narcissism, and environmental risk
This article develops the concept of “olfactory narcissism” through an analysis of Boris Raux’s multi-media artworks. Approaching narcissism through the sense of smell, Raux frames the self in insistently material, trans-corporeal terms. His olfactory projects thus explore questions about the porous self and the ethical and environmental stakes of “deodorization” and olfactory self-fashioning. The paper explores how olfactory aesthetics can contr…
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, s…
Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
The Smell of Risk considers the capacities of olfaction as a tool for sensing and staging modernity’s differentiated atmospheres and their associated environmental risks. Focusing on American literature and art from the 1890s to the present, the book considers how smell stages the pathways through which environmental materials enter and interact with bodies in detective fiction, naturalist novels, environmental illness memoirs, environmental just…
Naturalist Compulsion, Racial Divides, and the Time-Loop Zombie
This paper develops a dialogue between two lines of inquiry: on the one hand, Jennifer Fleissner’s groundbreaking reading of literary naturalism in terms of compulsive, repetitive gestures stuck in historical time; on the other hand, the recent special issue of Studies in Literary Naturalism on the topic of “Naturalism and Science Fiction.” Focusing on naturalism’s intersections with dystopian science fiction, this essay considers the transformed…
Introduction: The Molecular Intimacies of Empire
Special Forum Editors
The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A Conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez
A conversation with the artists Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez, whose work reckons with the imperial and colonial histories that underlie conventional materials of art and aesthetic experience. Glow and Rodriguez share insights about their artistic processes, their experiments with pigment-making, scent production, field research, and collaboration, and how they have reflected on and enacted alternatives to the transnational sourcing of pigmen…
Smell, History, and Heritage
Journal Article Smell, History, and Heritage Get access William Tullett, William Tullett Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Inger Leemans, Inger Leemans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Hsuan Hsu, Hsuan Hsu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Stephanie Weismann, Stephanie Weismann Search for other wor…
Art (14 works) · History (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)