Speaker: Hsuan Hsu (Professor of English, University of California, Davis)
Title: Atmo-Orientalism and Olfactory Aesthetics
Chair/Discussant: Xuelei Huang, University of Edinburgh
Date and Time: Wednesday, 24 Nov. 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT)
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Abstract:
This talk will consider the long history of “atmo-orientalism,” a mode of racial thinking and racial sensing that apprehends Asian immigrants as deviant assemblages of bodies and air. Tracing atmo-orientalism back to nineteenth-century public health discourses and the persistence of miasma theory in popular imagination, I focus on accounts of Asiatic odor that frequently associated Asian bodies with the dehumanizing effects of capitalist modernity. I then consider a range of Asian diasporic works that challenge this pattern of olfactory racism, including fiction by Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Larissa Lai, as well as art installations by Anicka Yi and Beatrice Glow.
Speaker 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.