Webinaire SEARCH/IUF avec Hsuan Hsu (UC Davis), 16h-18h

Hsuan L. Hsu (Professor of English, UC Davis) will give a talk entitled

 

"Racial Atmospheres and Olfactory Experiments in American Literature and Culture"

 

Hsuan L. Hsu is a professor of English at UC Davis and author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU, 2020), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), and Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010). He is currently writing a book about Air Conditioning for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

6 décembre 2021
16h
Webinaire SEARCH/IUF avec Hsuan Hsu, 16h-18h

Hsuan L. Hsu (Professor of English, UC Davis)
 
Racial Atmospheres and Olfactory Experiments in American Literature and Culture
 
Abstract. This talk explores the productive point of intersection between recent efforts to theorize race in atmospheric terms and research on the aesthetics of olfaction. I discuss how medical experts, jurists, racial scientists, and novelists mobilized olfactory discourse to produce and uphold racial distinctions, even as the uneven distribution of material odors has enacted environmental and bodily transformations that, among other things, biochemically differentiate racialized populations. I then consider works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People-of-Color) writers and artists such as Rudolph Fisher, Helena Maria Viramontes, Beatrice Glow, Anicka Yi, and Larissa Lai, who both expose these modes of olfactory violence and experiment with olfaction's capacities for producing alternative, expansive modes of material intimacy and more-than-human kinship.
 
Bio. Hsuan L. Hsu is a professor of English at UC Davis and author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU, 2020), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), and Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010). He is currently writing a book about Air Conditioning for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.