The Smell of Risk

Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics

Bibliographic Data

ID8104891
AuthorsHsuan L Hsu (0000-0002-0069-1898, corresponding author)
Year2020
Publication date2020-12-15
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueThe Smell of Risk (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherNew York University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.18574/nyu/9781479807215.001.0001
OpenAlexW4210480645
ISBN9781479807215
LanguageEN
Citations received15

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 justice narratives, and olfactory art. These texts reframe modernization as a regime of differential deodorization that relocates bad air and its associated noxious odors to vulnerable spaces and populations even as it derecognizes olfaction as a mode of embodied knowledge. The Smell of Risk brings insights from the fields of material ecocriticism, sensory studies, atmospheric geography, and critical race studies to bear on diverse contexts of atmospheric disparity, including Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ responses to racial discourses about Asiatic odors, and writings that explore the atmospheric devastation of settler colonialism and the olfactory capacities of Indigenous plants

Aesthetics · Art · Biology · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Epistemology · Indigenous · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Olfaction · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Ecology · History · Philosophy

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