Olfactory Worldmaking
Published on 19. February 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
134 pages
978-1-5179-2123-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
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.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
2 black and white illustrations and 1 table
Dimensions
Height: 178 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
113 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5179-2123-1 (9781517921231)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.