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.