Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 10

In an effort to understand the physical, affective, and social implications of breathing in the Anthropocene, this book brings together concepts, lines of inquiry, and incipient literary and nonliterary archives for doing olfactory ecocriticism—a mode of cultural analysis attuned to both the trans-corporeal transformations wrought by airborne chemicals and the representational challenges posed by the sense of smell. Environmental humanities scholars have demonstrated how cultural analysis can enhance our understanding of material entanglements between differentiated environments and the human and nonhuman bodies that inhabit them.76 This materialist turn in ecocriticism has drawn attention to molecular, cellular, and radioactive scales of “intra-action”77—to invoke feminist materialist philosopher Karen Barad’s term for “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies”78—that frequently resist visual representation. Not only do trans-corporeal relations involve scales of matter too small to be seen; they also call for nonrepresentational approaches to aesthetics attuned to transformations of embodiment and affect. As Dana Luciano has suggested, “The most compelling contribution of the new materialisms is not conceptual or analytic, strictly speaking, but sensory. The attempt to attend to the force of liveliness of matter will entail not just a reawakening or redirection of critical attention, but a reorganization of the senses.”79 Smell is inherently trans-corporeal, but (unlike taste) its perceptual range is both intimate and extended across space: thus, it is well adapted to the task of sensing how differentiated atmospheres get into bodies and populations.

Of course, the interpretive challenges presented by olfaction must be taken seriously. Smell’s subjectively variable, flitting, immersive, spatially dispersed, and hybrid (mixed with other smells or atmospheric conditions) qualities seem to defy the very concept of form—a concept that, even in literary studies, is frequently modeled on the visual arts (figured in terms of shapes, diagrams, and well-wrought urns). At the same time, the weak olfactory lexicon characteristic of many languages—which is at least partially the outcome of a studied lack of practice—makes smell difficult to communicate directly. Moreover, the combination of socially constructed and molecular components that informs olfactory perception frequently gives rise to material ambiguity—the impossibility of fully disentangling the cultural and chemical meanings of olfactory experience. If smell, like atmosphere, comprises an inchoate medium “in between” subject and object, it nevertheless takes shape in formal conventions and distortions, in vague yet elaborate descriptions, and in multimedia artworks that deploy smell as a complement or threat to visual and spatial perception. Although smell often floats in the background of texts and art galleries, it is nevertheless bound up with breathers’ bodies, minds, feelings, and actions. Olfactory reading thus blends the “atmospheric reading” practice modeled by Jesse Oak Taylor—which prioritizes aesthetic elements that hover in the background rather than plots of subject formation in an effort to “materialize the climates of history”80—with an attentiveness to the trans-corporeal and, in many cases, debilitating effects attributed to smells. It requires reading for olfactory references and descriptions that (like our awareness of unfamiliar smells) quietly blend into the background, while also attending to the ambiguous ways in which smell corporealizes both environmental materials and culturally constructed expectations. Beyond exposing the debilitating effects of bad air, reading for smell can attune us to the potentialities of altered mood, perception, and intimacy accessed through trans-corporeal intoxication. In both literature and visual art, olfactory reading does not just attune us to the presence and meaning of smells but also intervenes in the distribution of the sensible by challenging hegemonic practices of air conditioning and (putatively) disembodied perception.

The Smell of Risk covers literary and olfactory art focusing on the United States—not only one of the nations with the highest levels of carbon emissions but one whose culture has profoundly influenced global patterns of consumption and atmospheric differentiation. The nation’s outsized role in generating air pollution both within and well beyond US borders belies its exceptionally deodorized public culture: as anthropologist Edward Twitchell Hall notes, “In the use of the olfactory apparatus Americans are culturally underdeveloped.”81 To understand the transnational scope of air conditioning, I also consider texts concerned with extranational spaces—such as Cuba and Oceania—that have been affected by US-based practices of air conditioning. My archive juxtaposes literary texts oriented by olfaction with olfactory maps, artworks, nuisance complaints, public health investigations, crowd control weapons, and Indigenous accounts of smudging ceremonies. I center works of olfactory literature and conceptual art because they embrace the very difficulties—such as its resistance to description, recall, isolation, archiving, and objectivity—that have led the sense of smell to be marginalized in assessments of environmental risk. By embracing smell as a lived, embodied experience, the literary genres and olfactory artworks I analyze invite us to rethink how personhood is constituted through material association with engineered atmospheres. There are also productive differences between literary and nonrepresentational engagements with olfaction: whereas literary works leverage olfactory experience to critically represent and reframe practices of atmospheric engineering, olfactory artworks and practices are themselves performances of atmospheric engineering that can reinforce, critique, or enact alternatives to differential deodorization. In an effort to underscore the persistence of these aesthetic engagements with olfaction—as well as their transformations across time—this book (and several of its individual chapters) spans a history of industrial and postindustrial differential deodorization that begins with intersecting anxieties about miasma and race precipitated by industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century and extends to the new miasmas introduced by twentieth- and twenty-first-century synthetic chemicals, urban redevelopment, and intensive agriculture.

The Smell of Risk is divided into two parts. The book’s structure—moving from literary forms to olfactory art, then to the olfactory dynamics of racialization and colonialism—blends a roughly chronological progression with a conceptual arc moving from specific olfactory forms to later chapters that cover a range of antiracist and decolonial olfactory practices. The first three chapters consider the stakes of smell’s emergence into the deodorized field of Western aesthetics by analyzing aesthetic forms that foreground olfaction. Detective fiction, naturalist novels, and artworks that incorporate smell have all been marginalized for their “sensationalism”;82 yet these forms experiment with smell as a medium for deciphering and choreographing relations between bodies, populations, and atmospheres. Given the deodorized state of most nineteenth-century literary works and twentieth-century museums, why does smell emerge as a central element in these genres, and what aesthetic and political work does it do? The first two chapters consider the emergence and afterlives of the most prominent olfactory literary forms, emphasizing how detective fiction and naturalism model different approaches to smell as an index of environmental risk. Taking an ambient approach to the formal concerns that have been at the center of recent debates in literary studies,83 these chapters consider how olfaction manifests formally in genres that seem particularly sensitized to smell. Chapter 1, “‘Every Crime Has Its Peculiar Odor’: Detection, Deodorization, and Intoxication,” considers two forms—detective fiction and narratives by people with multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS)—that deploy hyperosmia (an extraordinary sense of smell) to detect, interpret, and resolve modernity’s proliferating risks. Whereas the deodorization plots that pervade nineteenth-century detective fiction tend to reassert social boundaries, Rudolph Fisher, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Sara Paretsky unsettle the figure of the deodorizing detective by representing hyperosmic detectives who are increasingly compromised by modernity’s racially and socioeconomically stratified atmospheres. This shift from policing crime to a more atmospheric and ontologically oriented environmental detection extends into MCS memoirs, which mobilize conventions of olfactory detection to manifest scientifically derecognized forms of embodied experience and environmental violence. Chapter 2, “Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice,” assesses literary naturalism’s thick descriptions of smell through an atmospheric reading of Frank Norris’s novel of lycanthropic transformation, Vandover and the Brute (1914). Unlike hyperosmic narratives—which frame olfaction as a mode of environmental perception—naturalist fiction depicts hypo-osmic characters who are hardly aware of the smells that envelop and debilitate them. Naturalism’s fascination with smell as an uncertain and hardly acknowledged index of debilitating urban atmospheres, I argue, has made it an invaluable resource for twentieth-century authors—like Ann Petry and Helena María Viramontes—whose works dramatize the everyday experiences of “breathers” traversing racially stratified urban and agricultural smellscapes in Harlem, East Los Angeles, and Central California. Chapter 3, “Olfactory Art and Museum Ecologies,” argues that the modern, air-conditioned “white cube” art gallery has been designed to conserve not only artworks but the deodorized sensorium of Western aesthetics. This account of the gallery as an architecture of deodorization illuminates the significance of olfactory art practices, which activate the gallery’s air as a material medium of sensation, affect, and potential threat. I focus on the intervention of artists—such as Boris Raux, Sean Raspet, Peter de Cupere, and Anicka Yi—who deploy nonrepresentational, olfactory elements to stage trans-corporeal interactions with modernity’s differentiated atmospheres.

The book’s concluding chapters shift focus from formal configurations of smell to the ways in which atmospheric manipulation contributes to racialization and colonization. Racial atmospherics spans a range of discourses and practices, from law, public health, and colonial education to architecture and olfactory weapons; it encompasses both the racializing dynamics of risk perception and differential exposures to material toxins. Aesthetic challenges to racial and colonial atmospherics have likewise experimented with a range of forms and strategies: thus, rather than focusing on specific forms, I consider how Asian diasporic and Indigenous writers, artists, and botanists have incorporated critical perspectives on olfaction into fiction, poetry, memoir, plant science, and the cultivation of nonhuman species. While some of these texts deploy olfaction to underscore atmospheric disparities among humans, others move beyond the anthropocentric frame that frequently constrains research on health disparities: in their work, olfactory ecologies encompass companion species such as ants, bacteria, maile, and sweetgrass. Chapter 4, “Atmo-Orientalism: Olfactory Racialization and Environmental Health,” considers how literary and public health discourses have racialized Asiatic bodies and spaces in olfactory terms. Instead of addressing the social and infrastructural determinants of environmental health in Chinese settlements, atmo-orientalism constructs the Chinese as a population plagued by risky, malodorous behaviors. In addition to provoking questions about how racialization works through olfaction and trans-corporeal atmospheres (rather than primarily through vision and the ascription of innate biological characteristics), this pattern of stigmatizing Asian immigrants as an atmospheric threat provides context for understanding olfactory and atmospheric language in the writings of Edith Maude Eaton / Sui Sin Far, as well as intoxicating olfactory encounters orchestrated by contemporary artist Anicka Yi. Chapter 5, “Decolonizing Smell,” argues that colonization disrupts Indigenous cosmologies, cultural practices, and health by simultaneously derecognizing olfactory epistemologies and materially reshaping atmospheric ecologies. After documenting how colonization manipulates the smellscape by selectively deodorizing, transforming, polluting, and weaponizing atmospheres, I turn to the work of three Indigenous authors—Albert Wendt (Samoa), Haunani-Kay Trask (Kanaka Maoli), and Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi)—who address the challenges of decolonizing smell at the levels of the sensorium and material ecologies. In a brief epilogue I consider how the olfactory narratives, artworks, and poems traced in this book might reframe our understanding of everyday olfactory interventions such as “fragrance-free” advocacy, stink bombs, and smudging. While advocacy for fragrance-free products and spaces has made important contributions by exposing everyday toxic exposures in particular contexts, I argue that this deodorizing thread of olfactory politics should be supplemented by a renewed sensitivity to olfaction as a powerful tool for thinking, feeling, and producing ecological relations across spatial and temporal scales.