Digital List Price: | $29.99 |
Kindle Price: | $22.49 Save $7.50 (25%) |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics Kindle Edition
A timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality
Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity’s olfactory disparities.
The Smell of Risk outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity’s differentiated atmospheres as a subject worth sniffing out. From the industrial revolution to current-day environmental crises, Hsu uses ecocriticism, geography, and critical race studies to, for example, explore Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ response to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the devastation settler colonialism has reaped on Indigenous smellscapes. In each instance, Hsu demonstrates the violence that air maintenance, control, and conditioning enacts on the poor and the marginalized. From nineteenth-century miasma theory theory to the synthetic chemicals that pervade twenty-first century air, Hsu takes smell at face value to offer an evocative retelling of urbanization, public health, and environmental violence.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNYU Press
- Publication dateDecember 15, 2020
- File size1773 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
- Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (Thinking Art)Larry ShinerKindle Edition
Editorial Reviews
Review
"[T]hree decades of deepening and expanding research into olfactory perception that began in literature and anthropology is now on full transdisciplinary display in Hsu's book. He pushes both theorization and applied olfactory functions far into the framework of global capitalism and its ever more unevenly polluted airspaces, the atmosphere of which we all physically inhale as breathing, sentient beings." Hans Rindisbacher, American Literary History
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B08KJGW7YJ
- Publisher : NYU Press (December 15, 2020)
- Publication date : December 15, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 1773 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 265 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,025,445 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #368 in Asian American Studies (Kindle Store)
- #606 in Aesthetics (Kindle Store)
- #1,425 in Asian American Studies (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon