Hsuan L. Hsu, Olfactory Worldmaking
Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.
Hsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilize scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably livable worlds.
Published by University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2026
134 pages
ISBN: 9781517921231
Hsuan L. Hsu
Hsuan L. Hsu is the author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU, 2020), Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024), Olfactory Worldmaking (Minnesota, 2026), and (with Sal Nicolazzo) a long-form essay on "Candice Lin and Colonialism's Promiscuous Materials" (Andy Warhol Foundation, forthcoming). He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.