How do smells (whether conscious or unconsciously perceived) produce communities of “common sense,” and how might they support or unsettle power relations? How does the sense of smell disrupt models of “critical thinking” that have been central to practices of both “close” and “distant” reading? Does reading about smell sensitize us to smells, or to their various entanglements with cultural discourses and unevenly distributed atmospheric toxins? The very qualities that have made smell seem worthless in the (ocularcentric) eyes of Western aesthetics—for example, being subjective, immersive, affective, involuntary, spatially dispersed, invisible, visceral, frequently involuntary, “chemical” (as Kant put it), and difficult to describe—make it a particularly generative resource for staging and thinking about the production of cultural and racial boundaries, the cultural and chemical delineation of differentiated spaces, and the chemical agencies of memory, sexual attraction, and environmental toxicity.
In “Perceived Truth, Sensory Consequences, and ‘Amalgamation’ in Antebellum Olfactory Dystopias,” Andrew Kettler traces discourses of irrational yet embodied racism in two works of dystopian fiction. In the wake of the Nullification Crisis that shook both North and South with the threat of war over questions of race, slavery, and nation during the early 1830s, Jerome Holgate’s Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation (1835) imagined a need for anti-odor machines in a dystopic U.S. that has succumbed to the imagined ravages of miscegenation. In a future Northern city, the idea of interracial union resulted in the compulsory breeding of white women and African men, often portrayed in the work as brutes and primates through different sensory categories of odor and craniometric descriptions that were historically used to construct levels of civilization and savagery. Two decades later, Cephas Broadluck, a pseudonym for the American author Allen Gazlay, offered another dystopian account of imagined scenarios of sensory and sexual amalgamation in Races of Humankind with Travels in Grubland (1856). Like Holgate, Broadluck imagined modes of olfactory detection as a racial defense for the white body politic. These two dystopian authors leveraged their embodied sense of olfactory disgust in speculative depictions of racial difference intended to critique abolitionist ambitions as sexually motivated. Their participation in the construction of white supremacist Democracy prior to the Civil War mobilized a literary discourse of olfactory dystopia intended to present visceral, sensory warnings against a future in which black and white bodies were allowed to mix into what their racist minds and bodies understood as pungent and monstrous hybridity.
In “The Hyperosmic Detective,” Hsuan Hsu traces the figure of the hyperosmic detective from Edgar Allan Poe’s metaphor of the detective “on the scent” to twentieth-century hardboiled crime fiction and contemporary narratives of environmental detection. By deploying hyperosmia (an extraordinary sense of smell) on both literal and figurative levels, detective fiction leverages the chemical sensitivity of olfaction as a means of perceiving, interpreting, and resolving modernity’s proliferating risks. The paper begins with classic works by Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, showing how the detective’s sense of smell was put in the service of individualizing risk factors and criminalizing racialized and working-class bodies. Whereas the deodorization plots that pervade nineteenth-century detective fiction tends to reassert social boundaries, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, and Sarah Paretsky unsettle the figure of the deodorizing detective by representing black, female, and/or working class detectives who are increasingly compromised by modernity’s racially and socio-economically stratified atmospheres. As they use their noses to sniff out crime, these detectives simultaneously register the chemical, trans-corporeal risks posed by unevenly distributed air pollution. This shift from policing crime to a more atmospheric and ontologically oriented environmental detection culminates in the blockbuster Ukrainian television serial, The Sniffer, whose detective figure is a hyperosmic chemist frequently unable to negotiate everyday spaces due to his extreme environmental sensitivity.
Hans Rindisbacher’s paper, “Perfume, Travel, and Memory: Scented Trails of Female Self-Realization” traces the contours of an emergent genre, the perfumoirlogue—a form of writing whose predominantly female-identified authors blend memoir and travelogue with a formal and thematic emphasis on perfumery and olfactory experience. Perfumoirlogue combines fiction with autobiography and has a strong presence in Internet blogging, blurring boundaries between private, public, aesthetic, artistic, and commercial aspects of women’s self-presentation. These texts mix empowering self-reflections on travel and personal growth with a mode of olfactory writing in which the sense of smell provides an indispensable portion of the atmospherics, is closely associated with one or several main characters, relates to their interest or work, motivates their actions, their thinking, feeling, remembering, etc., and drives, to a significant extent, the very plot. Tracing the genre’s circulation across magazine columns, blogs, memoirs, novels, and other modes of olfactory writing, Rindisbacher demonstrates how it connects a broad, predominantly female audience with scientific and aesthetic knowledge about smell and, as well as esthetic, atmospheric, and psychological narrative in which the olfactory takes a natural place. Leveraging longstanding cultural tendencies to associate women with both scents and olfactory sensitivity, the perfumoirlogue counters the ancient sexual pursuit story with the male the active subject, the female the passive object of olfactory-stimulated attraction. Thus knowledge about and dexterity in dealing with odors has emerged as a novel venue of women's empowerment.