Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice

Chapter 2 traces formal and thematic connections between naturalist fiction and environmental justice narratives by analyzing their pervasive, underexamined references to smell. In representative works by Frank Norris, Ann Petry, and Helena María Viramontes, descriptions of noxious odors indicate spaces and experiences of atmospheric intoxication as characters take airborne particulates into their bodies. Thus, olfactory references—whether they take the form of extensive or offhand descriptions, and whether or not characters are fully conscious of their implications—stage the biopolitical effects of unevenly distributed atmospheric risks.

Olfactory Art and Museum Ecologies

Chapter 3 considers the tensions between mixed-media artworks that incorporate scent and the carefully controlled atmospheres of Western art museums and galleries. After tracing the origins and rationales of museums’ climate control practices, the chapter argues that conventional museum ecologies are premised on an artificially deodorized atmosphere that renders air imperceptible as a matter of political concern. Olfactory art, by contrast, underscores the trans-corporeal exchanges between galleries and visitors’ bodies by centering the experience of inhalation. Close analysis of artworks by Boris Raux, Sean Raspet, Anicka Yi, and Peter de Cupere exemplifies how artists use scent to communicate atmospheric risks and disparities in direct and visceral terms.

“Every Crime Has Its Peculiar Odor”

Chapter 1 considers how detective fiction has interacted with the history of differential deodorization. Whereas nineteenth-century texts tend to frame the hyperosmic detective as an agent of deodorization who seeks out and expunges deviant odors, the author argues that the form has also developed accounts of “environmental detection” wherein the detective’s body and mind become exposed and transformed through the very process of sniffing out crime. In the cases of black detective fiction, hard-boiled crime fiction, and narratives of multiple chemical sensitivity that mobilize detective tropes, smells are no longer just clues to be read but material agents of violence.

Atmo-Orientalism

Drawing on travelogues, legal documents, public health reports, descriptions of Chinatowns, Yellow Peril fiction, and racial iconography, this chapter traces a long-standing mode of racial discourse that has framed Asiatic bodies and practices as embodiments of modernity’s noxious atmospheres. It then considers how the early twentieth-century author Edith Maude Eaton / Sui Sin Far and the contemporary conceptual artist Anicka Yi deploy scent to critique and redress this pattern of olfactory racialization.

Decolonizing Smell

Chapter 5 considers settler colonialism’s effects on the smellscape as a mode of atmospheric violence that targets a fundamental material contributor to Indigenous health, culture, and ecological relations. The chapter suggests that decolonizing smell requires both attending to Indigenous olfactory practices that have been decimated by colonial education and reshaping smellscapes that have been transformed by colonization. This argument unfolds through readings of Indigenous commentaries on smudging and the writings of Albert Wendt (Samoa), Haunani-Kay Trask (Kanaka Maoli), and Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi).

Introduction

The introduction argues that modernization in the United States has been sustained by processes of differential deodorization that relocate undesirable airborne materials to vulnerable places and populations, and that the sense of smell has played an important role in sensing and staging how noxious air affects bodies, minds, and moods. Building on work in material ecocriticism, geography, race studies, and sensory studies, it develops an environmental framework for studying olfactory aesthetics in works of literature and conceptual art.

Epilogue

The epilogue brings the book’s theorization of the connections between embodied environmental risks and olfactory aesthetics to bear on everyday contexts of olfactory politics. Discussing examples drawn from Indra Sinha and the Yes Men, the author suggests that stink bombs and malodorous performances that relocate noxious odors from vulnerable spaces into the conventionally deodorized spaces of economic and political deliberation offer a provocative counterweight to the movement for “fragrance-free” spaces and lifestyles. Like the aesthetic examples analyzed throughout the book, these noxious irruptions exemplify the power of olfaction as an embodied mode of thought, feeling, and protest.