Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 8

In a 2016 Los Angeles Times article, “‘We Cannot Breathe’: A Poor Alabama Town Has Lived with the Rotten Egg Stench of Gas for 8 Years,” Ivan Penn contrasts the promptness of relocations and remediation in the wake of the 2015 Aliso Canyon methane leak near a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood outside Los Angeles with a similar incident in the low-income, predominantly Black neighborhood of Eight Mile, Alabama. Although Eight Mile residents had endured the “stifling rotten egg stench” of mercaptan (a chemical used to add odor to natural gas) resulting from an estimated five hundred gallons of spilled natural gas for over eight years, “there have been no relocations to hotels or rented homes. No transfers to schools out of harm’s way. No US Cabinet members swooping in to investigate. No national media hordes.”44 In both locations residents alleged that the odor was not just obnoxious but physically debilitating, “describing symptoms such as nosebleeds, respiratory distress, nausea, vomiting, seizures, vision problems and hypertension.”45 The different responses to these two leaks on the part of media, politicians, and Sempra Energy (a San Diego–based corporation that owned both facilities) illustrate how economic, political, and discursive forces shape the dynamics of differential deodorization. In addition to disparities in income and political representation, long-standing stereotypes about race, purity, and hygiene inform the decision to deprioritize calls to clean up noxious odors in a poor, predominantly Black neighborhood. How could odor complaints in Eight Mile register as worthy of sustained media attention in a culture steeped in racist beliefs about deodorized whiteness and Black “odor”?46

Eight Mile’s eight-year exposure to noxious fumes exemplifies a glaring problem with accounts of modernization as a process of progressive deodorization. As Mark Jenner observes, historians tend to assume that modernity is deodorized, focusing their olfactory inquiries on the unpleasant odors of past eras.47 Like beliefs in the universality of breathing, atmosphere, and even the human species (which is biochemically differentiated by chemical and radioactive body burdens), the notion of deodorization as a teleological process is belied by ongoing and increasingly complex techniques of air conditioning. The historical period covered in this book begins in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization—a process entangled with both air pollution and vast waves of immigration and rural-to-urban migration—dramatically transformed the atmosphere of many US cities and towns. Before the adoption of the germ theory of disease in the later part of the century, health authorities attributed disease to “miasma” or polluted air. London sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick’s assertion that “all smell is disease” captures the essential role that smell played in detecting nineteenth-century health risks.48 Miasma theory made deodorization and other modes of olfactory regulation a central goal for urban planners and public health officials in Europe and the United States: as art historian Caroline Jones puts it, “Bureaucracies found smells imperative to organize; in turn, smells called further bureaucracies into being.”49 Even after miasma theory gave way to germ theory, deodorized spaces have continued to be associated with Enlightenment conceptions of “civilization,” health, and the transcendence of the body.

But deodorization was not evenly realized across space: rather, it was a partial and differential project of air conditioning. While efforts to deodorize public and private space claim to improve public health, they frequently focus on semiotic and cosmetic forms of deodorization (covering up unpleasant smells or moving them around) rather than equitably reducing atmospheric risks. Alongside these processes of atmospheric engineering—which have disproportionately exposed industrial, agricultural, and domestic laborers; poor and/or racialized communities; military personnel and communities located near military sites; and colonized and postcolonial populations to noxious air—discourses associating the health of individuals, races, and nations with pure air have blamed atmospheric pollution on these very populations by representing them as “ecological others,” Sarah Jaquette Ray’s term for groups that are stigmatized as environmentally impure, careless, or disengaged.50 Thus, differential deodorization simultaneously produces atmospheric disparities (from the scale of the individual body to the transnational impacts of heavy industry in the Global South) and discursively stigmatizes the populations targeted by those disparities by representing deodorization as either an individual hygienic responsibility or a racial characteristic. Reframing the history of modernity’s atmospheres through the concept of differential deodorization emphasizes how the sense of smell has been entangled with contested understandings of environmental health over the past two centuries. Whether through unpleasant smells, mood-enhancing smells, or the putative absence of smells, olfactory aesthetics stages the political and ethical implications of atmospheric differentiation from the Progressive Era to contemporary contexts of environmental injustice and colonization.