How does smell attune us to possibility? Hsuan L. Hsu studies smell’s capacity to shape our worlds, our futures, and our modes of being and relating—noting that olfactory worldmaking is going on around us all the time. Hsu is joined here in conversation with Ally Louks.
Hsuan L. Hsu is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is author of Olfactory Worldmaking; 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.
Ally Louks is an author, literary scholar, and public academic who teaches at the University of Cambridge. Louks has several book projects in progress including Under Your Nose: The Pleasures and Politics of Smell.
REFERENCES:
Hsuan Hsu / The Smell of Risk
Warren Cariou
Renee Stout
Anicka Yi / In Love With The World, Tate Modern exhibition
Tanaïs / In Sensorium
Bruno Latour
Erica Fretwell / Sensory Experiments
Chanelle Dupuis
Teresa Brennan
J. Douglas Porteous
Proust’s madeleine
Jhumpa Lahiri
Saidiya Hartman
Manu Vimalassery, Juniana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4.
Lisa Lowe / The Intimacies of Four Continents
Roshanak Kheshti / We See with the Skin
Christina Sharpe
Sylvia Wynter
Octavia Butler / Fledgling
Larissa Lai / Salt Fish Girl
Claus Wedekind / Sweaty T-Shirt experiment
William Carlos Williams / Smell!
Elizabeth Freeman / Time Binds
Byung-Chul Han / The Scent of Time
Milena Popova /Dubcon
Kandice Chuh / The Difference Aesthetics Makes
Olfactory Worldmaking by Hsuan L. Hsu is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press, in print and in an open access edition. Thank you for listening.
