BOOK NEWS: How literary scent offers new ways of relating

Olfactory Worldmaking

By Hsuan L. Hsu

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN 978-1-5179-2123-1 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921231/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.

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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.

"By articulating scent as both a multilayered medium and an ethical practice, Hsu’s work situates sensory experience squarely within contemporary debates in societal multimodality while simultaneously challenging the field to grapple with the unresolved frictions, contradictions, and inequalities that attend atmospheric and olfactory relations." —Multimodality & Society

Hsuan L. Hsu is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is author of 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.