»Kultur denken. Season 8 Episode 3: OLFAC with Hsuan L. Hsu

00:00:14:

00:00:25: Hi again and welcome back to episode three of Kultur Denken, the podcast for International Research Center for Cultural Studies from the Eufach Symposium in Vienna.

00:00:36: I'm speaking with Sean Chu.

00:00:38: Sean's books are basically classics on the sensory-of-smell studies.

00:00:42: Hi Sean!

00:00:43: Hi

00:00:43: Katarina!

00:00:44: Sean is professor English at University of California Davis.

00:00:48: His research explores nineteenth- and twentieth century US literature, Asian diaspora and race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies and environmental humanities.

00:00:59: His recent work examines the role of affectionate atmosphere in shaping social and spatial inequalities as well an artistic and political practices.

00:01:08: He is currently completing a manuscript on olfactory world making And he's author of The Monographs' Air Conditioning & The Smell Of Risk.

00:01:17: Yeah, so the smell of risk was

00:01:19: you know a twenty-twenty book in which I focus

00:01:23: on Smell as a sensory capacity for perceiving

00:01:29: and communicating about environmental toxicity right?

00:01:33: So especially toxic air Which i think addresses both.

00:01:39: The way in which toxicity is often invisible and the really powerful ways in which people respond to smells, but also really

00:01:49: contentious

00:01:50: ways so that often scientists will kind of respond or especially corporate

00:01:58: scientists.

00:01:59: That just because one can smell something in the air doesn't mean it's harmful.

00:02:07: So there's a lot of kind of like political contestation, the role-of-smells which is

00:02:12: part what I'm interested in.

00:02:14: I am interested how atmosphere both

00:02:17: materially

00:02:18: and affectively conditions people right?

00:02:21: And affects people unevenly.

00:02:24: So it has this kind of like really insidious

00:02:26: force

00:02:27: and some of the ways in which that happens I think are through smell, right?

00:02:33: so the distribution of different kinds of smells but also like The different

00:02:37: ways in Which smell

00:02:38: gets recognized or stigmatized as a mode Of knowledge at all.

00:02:42: Right.

00:02:43: And then Also In Temperature, right...which is not just atmospheric But i-that was Kind of Like my point of entry into thinking about temperature you know, other things like metabolic or clothing.

00:02:55: Yeah!

00:02:55: Like sun exposure and wind... Things like this.

00:02:59: Sean uses the term olfactory colonization to describe how colonial projects control and devalue smell in smellscapes within broader systems of domination.

00:03:08: This occurs through an ideology of deodorisation that dismisses smell as too bodily or subjective and through material transformations of smellscapes via war, industry agriculture tourism and other environmental changes.

00:03:23: These processes erode indigenous olfactory knowledge in relations enabling the remaking of land air and social space while concealing sensory and epistemic violence.

00:03:33: In his talk at The Olfa Conference Sean is trying to offer the idea of smelling-in-the past conditional mood which is first of all a grammatical mood, that sets the focus on what could have been or happened.

00:03:47: In my talk I was trying to

00:03:50: offer an idea about smelling in past conditional

00:03:54: mode

00:03:56: as against positive historical tendency

00:04:01: trying to recover

00:04:03: historical smells or recover evidence of how historical people experienced

00:04:08: smell,

00:04:08: kind of like as it actually was smelled.

00:04:11: I mean that approach is really important and very influential in heritage studies especially this attempt to reconstruct historical smells and present them to the public.

00:04:23: It gets a certain kind of public attention but i think take for granted the completeness and the kind of truth of The Archive.

00:04:34: Smell, as Sean shows has recently been at the center of major developments in the fields of heritage studies and sensory history.

00:04:42: One example of a recreated historical scent is the interior of Queen Elizabeth Beloved Rover P-Fife B car.

00:04:50: but Sean also states

00:04:52: It's relatively uncritical about the limitations of the archive, The way in which it privileges certain olfactory perspectives.

00:05:00: We could say like the white patriarchal Eurocentric nose and also the way that it glosses over.

00:05:10: therefore you know a whole range Of different kinds of olfactor experiences And meanings

00:05:17: as well as the relationships

00:05:19: That they might open up between different people, different groups humans and non-humans.

00:05:26: So thinking about smell

00:05:29: in the past conditional

00:05:30: mood which

00:05:30: is an idea that I take from Lisa Lowe's really influential book The Intimacies of Four Continents where she talks kind

00:05:40: approaching historical

00:05:41: archives

00:05:48: traces a critical history of liberalism and its hidden intimacies by examining widely dispersed colonial archives in regions.

00:05:56: In his presentation, Sean quotes what Lowe proposes.

00:06:00: quote

00:06:01: A past conditional temporality through which I suggest it is possible to conceive the past not as fixed or settled Not as inaugurating The temporality into which our present falls but has a configuration Of multiple contingent possibilities all present yet none

00:06:17: inevitable.

00:06:18: the past conditional temporality of what could have been symbolizes a space of attention that holds at once, the positive objects and methods respected by modern history and social science as well see inquiries into connections.

00:06:35: It allows us to revisit times of historical contingency and possibility, to consider alternatives that may have been unthought in those times.

00:06:44: And might otherwise remain so now In order to imagine different features for what lies ahead.

00:06:51: Sean explains That this idea allows us To approach our factory questions and issues more speculatively.

00:06:58: So

00:06:59: thinking beyond

00:07:01: a positivist approach and I focus on kind Of like relatively quote, hard evidence.

00:07:07: And

00:07:07: so I turn to

00:07:08: works of literature and art that are speculative in their method for

00:07:13: just kind of like

00:07:14: thinking with them in these speculative ways.

00:07:17: The examples that i look at our Toni

00:07:20: Morrison's Song Of Solomon which is largely a realist novel but

00:07:25: also has you know numerous magical realistic elements

00:07:29: most prominently

00:07:30: the kind of story of The Flying African, which has been the focus to a lot of scholarship on the novel.

00:07:36: But I focused

00:07:38: attention

00:07:39: as-on this alternative way of becoming atmospheric right?

00:07:43: So not flying men but working with smells, with roots and domestic care work reproductive labor so more let's say, like black feminist modes of working with Anne in the air.

00:08:00: So I look at this sweet ginger

00:08:03: smell that she describes really evocatively for numerous paragraphs and that crops up throughout the novel in scenes that focus on the work of a conjure woman so-the character pilot...and other kind of Black matriarch figures

00:08:21: in order to

00:08:21: think about like atmospheres of care, right?

00:08:24: That are extended across generations and connect the geographies that they inhabit with ancestral communities both in the South and in Africa.

00:08:36: The Flying African as Sean explains is a folkloric figure linked to Igbo landing where group of Igbo captives having seized control over their slave ship entered a stream after it ran aground in Georgia.

00:08:49: Enslaved West Africans and their descendants in the region believed that these captives either flew or were carried by water back to home land.

00:08:57: From this history, The figure of flying African emerges as a metaphor for both refusal and transcendence evoking the enduring ties between the African diaspora and ancestral places & cultures.

00:09:10: In the final scene of Toni Morrison's book, the protagonist Milkman dead leaps off a cliff believing he will take flight.

00:09:17: That is after Milkman learns towards the end of his quest for self-knowledge, that his ancestor Solomon was among the flying Africans who flew back to Africa to escape from slavery.

00:09:28: In this presentation Sean states that the titular song of Solomon does not center the Flying African so much as those he leaves behind.

00:09:36: quote

00:09:38: Oh Solomon don't leave me here cotton balls to choke me.

00:09:41: Solomon done fly Solomon done gone.

00:09:45: By juxtaposing the archetype of flight with the suffering and sorrow Of The Women And Children Left Behind, Morrison Offers A Critical Perspective On Flight And The Freedom Of Mobility As Techniques Of Survival Disproportionately Available To Able-Budied Black Men Who Are Willing to Leave Kin And Community Obligations behind.

00:10:05: At the heart Then Is The Question How Can One Ride The Air Without Leaving Loved Ones Behind?

00:10:14: Song of Solomon explores smell as an alternative to flight and other means of becoming atmospheric.

00:10:20: If flight is Milkman's patriarchal inheritance, scent is frequently associated with the novel's women along with domestic spaces they inhabit in acts of care that perform.

00:10:31: Milkman's aunt Pilate becomes important mentor as he gains some measure independence from his father's devotion to bourgeois accumulation.

00:10:40: Educated by a migrant root worker and described by several critics as the conjure woman, Pilate lives with her daughter and granddaughter in an unkempt yet welcoming house suffused with a distinctive odor.

00:10:52: Both Pilate and her house are introduced through olfactory impressions.

00:10:56: Her brother disparages her quote sickening smell And her house is described as quote shiny and brown with a smell.

00:11:03: Although this smell violates deodorized bourgeois norms Milkman learns that its main conceptions are the pine trees near a pilot's house and the fermenting wine she produces to support her family.

00:11:16: There is something inexplicably alluring about this smell, Milkman spends hours in his house listening to the pilot talk because quote The Piney-Winey Smell was Narcotic.

00:11:27: Sean also draws attention to the fact not all of these smells can be traced into physical sources.

00:11:32: Quote,

00:11:33: quote.

00:11:33: on autumn nights in some parts of the city.

00:11:36: The wind from the lake brings a Swedish smell to shore and odor like crystallized ginger or sweet iced tea with a dark clove floating in it.

00:11:45: There is no explanation for this smell either since the Lake on September nineteenth nineteen sixty three was so full of mill refuse And the chemical waste's have a plastic manufacturer that the hair off the willow said stood near the shore was thin and pale.

00:11:59: end quote.

00:12:01: Here Morrison acknowledges the lakeside air filled with industrial pollutants as a vehicle of environmental slow violence that affects humans and non-humans alike.

00:12:11: But while The Willow's thinning hair indicates how vulnerable living beings are to toxic harm, exceeds the issue of environmental toxicity, drawing our attention instead to materials – ginger sugar tea and cloves whose circulation and intermixture were bound up with histories of slavery.

00:12:41: This smell also contains historic attentions that have more positive resonances as Sean states further in his presentation.

00:12:50: Although it was not an inherently or exclusively African material, Ginger eventually incorporated into local culinary health and spiritual practice on both sides of the Atlantic.

00:13:02: Like other roots incorporated into African syncretic practices, ginger is also an apt metaphor for rootedness or a connection with ancestral lands including Africa the Caribbean and those who moved during the Great Migration—the South.

00:13:16: At the same time like the concept of diaspora which refers to sowing seeds often by wind The scent of Ginger holds together the concepts of rootedness and volatilized mobility.

00:13:28: quote, the air that could have come straight from a marketplace in Accra.

00:13:33: Song of Solomon then follows this ginger-sugar smell onto shore where it contributes to the production of a sensory and social divide.

00:13:41: Morrison details a smellscape inflected by architecture infrastructure and a complex social geography that separates the wealthy people living near the lake from the south side whose disproportionately black residents cannot afford air conditioning.

00:13:56: Quote, yet there was this heavy spice-sweet smell that made you think of the east and striped tents.

00:14:01: And the sha sha sha of leg bracelets.

00:14:04: The people who lived near the lake hadn't noticed the smell for a long time now because when air conditioners came they shut their windows and slept a light surface sleep under the motor's drone.

00:14:14: So the ginger sugar blew unnoticed through the streets, around the trees over roofs until thinned out and weakened a little.

00:14:21: It reached south side.

00:14:23: there where some houses didn't even have screens let alone air conditioners.

00:14:27: The windows were thrown wide open to whatever the night had to offer And their the ginger smell was sharp.

00:14:33: Sharp enough to distort dreams and make the sleeper believe that things he hungered for we're right at hand.

00:14:38: To the south side residents who were awake on such nights, it gave all their thoughts and activity a quality of being both intimate and far away.

00:14:46: The two men standing near the pines on Darling Street right near the Brown House where wine drinkers went could smell the air but they didn't think of ginger.

00:14:54: each thought that was way freedom smelled or justice or luxury or

00:14:58: vengeance.".

00:14:59: In contrast

00:15:02: to the deodorized climate-controlled air of wealthy homes, The open windows of their simple residences in the south expose inhabitants To both industrial toxins and evocative diasporic scents like the ginger that blur boundaries Of space memory And desire.

00:15:19: Toni Morrison uses this shifting or factory perception to show how the sweet ginger smells, does milkman's unconscious longing for origin setting in motion his journey towards ancestral discovery.

00:15:31: Sean summarizes...

00:15:33: If flight is a novel most salient aerial motif smell lingers through its background as an airborne medium of memory affect and black feminist care.

00:15:43: Although the novel never offers a literal explanation for The Sweet Ginger Scent that emanates from the lake over Mercy, Michigan it repeatedly associates this scent with everyday lives of pilot and other black women.

00:15:56: Smell attunes us not only to body in flight but to aerial medium which holds and sustains flight.

00:16:02: Throughout the novel, The Sweets Scent of Ginger a route grounded in women's everyday practices of care and conjure and volatilized into airborne matter offers another model for surrendering to air and riding its currents of affect and polychronic resonance.

00:16:18: A sensuous mode of access.

00:16:35: Then he also looks at Candice Lynn's installation Swampfet, exhibited in New Orleans in two thousand twenty-one and twenty-two.

00:16:42: The gallery was suffused with a scent of dried shrimp and decaying vermin which was also infused into the suit of sculptures that were made to resemble dead creatures atop enormous blocks.

00:16:55: what looked like marbled meat

00:16:57: Swamp fat

00:16:58: is about

00:16:59: a community of

00:17:00: Filipino sailors who abandoned their ships where they were working or forced to work under exploitative conditions

00:17:09: and started

00:17:10: up a fishing and shrimping Community in Louisiana, so in the swamps of Louisiana.

00:17:17: And

00:17:18: she's kind commemorating that community,

00:17:21: but not really in a way it's like trying to claim recognition for its humanness or for its long labors and the service of American industry.

00:17:35: But rather

00:17:36: thinking

00:17:36: about as site inter-species intimacy between fishermen and various nonhuman creatures as well as cross-racial kinds of solidarity between the fishermen.

00:17:53: And she talks about maroon fugitive slaves who are reportedly joined in a community, Chinese

00:18:01: people

00:18:03: also reportedly lived

00:18:05: and worked among that community.

00:18:08: St.

00:18:08: Melo, the Filipino community in the Louisiana swamps was first brought to national attention in eighteen eighty-three when Harper's Weekly sent a writer Lafcadio Hearn to investigate their villages.

00:18:21: quote amphibious existence unquote.

00:18:24: Sean explains his presentation

00:18:27: beginning with a spurious rumor about quote aghastly Chinese colony and the reedy swamps.

00:18:34: Hearn casts the swamp and its racialized inhabitants in gothic terms.

00:18:38: For Hearn, and his primarily white middle-class readers, Saint Malo was quote dark ruined rotted and spectral.

00:18:45: he describes the Filipino villagers in nonhuman terms.

00:18:49: quote supple as freshwater eels.

00:18:51: there's houses looming over the marsh.

00:18:53: quote like cranes watching for scaly prey.

00:18:56: Despite its limitations, Hearn's sketch is one of the few surviving first-hand accounts in the settlement which was destroyed by Hurricane in nineteen fifteen.

00:19:06: In recent years Filipino historians have rejected Hearns primitivist perspective by reframing The Village as a site that establishes along historical presence of Filipino settlers and their contributions to it economy.

00:19:19: Recovery narratives focused on shoring up Filipino-American heritage, seek to humanize St.

00:19:25: Malo's inhabitants by making claims for local and national

00:19:29: belonging.".

00:19:30: So this is an example of one.

00:19:32: instead Lynn's installation situates the fishermen amid the myriad messy interactions that make up swamp ecologies.

00:19:44: The blended scent of shrimp and decaying vermin recasts the swamp as a site of lively, unruly entanglements.

00:19:52: to be swamped is to be overwhelmed with water or excess in a way that unsettles conventional ideals of solidity and temporal progression.

00:20:01: Lynn's term, swamp-fat, reframes the swamp as a space of excess or abundance and not just for its human inhabitants.

00:20:10: Where Hearn emphasizes the village's regional isolation, Lynn's shrimp scent highlights St Mello's pivotal role in producing dried shrimp from both the regional economy where it became vital ingredient in Creole cuisine and in the global market.

00:20:24: By shaping clay from St.

00:20:26: Malo into blocks of marbled meat, Lin also foregrounds multiple histories of animal rendering and racialized laborer that converge in an around-the village.

00:20:37: Noting that Saint Malo's fishermen were quote joined by Chinese indentured coley laborers and fugitive slaves, Lin frames the village as an experimental site for crossracial kinship.

00:20:50: The installation's meat-like scalliola blocks are also intended to invoke the slaughterhouse cases, a key Supreme Court ruling from eighteen seventy three on the fourteenth amendment in which group of white butchers sought to exclude black and other nonwhite butchery.

00:21:07: Instead presenting dried shrimp as scent that evokes rarefied notions of quote Asian American identity SwampFat reanimates it in relation with other materials and other scenes of racialized labor.

00:21:21: What kinds of proximities, differences, and potential grounds for solidarity existed—and may still exist between Black- and Asian diasporic workers who have been racialized in part through their domestic and occupational proximities to nonhuman animals?

00:21:37: Without trying to fully recover or monumentalize these stories, Lin resuscitates their webs of cross-racial interspecies relations.

00:21:45: The shrimp and its scent, along with clay sourced from St.

00:21:49: Malo hold memories of the feet that crushed them in the village's ritualized shrimp

00:21:54: dance.".

00:21:55: Candice Lin also asks people to smear the shrimp fat on themselves.

00:21:59: Sean elaborates this idea.

00:22:02: Yeah so she made a balm out of mixed smells

00:22:07: of dried shrimp

00:22:09: and decaying vermin

00:22:12: from dead animals gifted to her by her cat.

00:22:16: And then infused

00:22:18: it

00:22:18: into lard, that was the balm.

00:22:20: and she put in these sculptures of dead swamp creatures right?

00:22:26: So like a small kyman or an alligator-like creature Like a reptile A frog They're kind of open and visitors could take some of the balm You know rub on

00:22:37: themselves

00:22:38: and leave exhibition wearing.

00:22:40: And I think

00:22:41: partly it invites visitors

00:22:43: to

00:22:43: kind of like.

00:22:44: decide, right?

00:22:45: Like how intimate do they want to be with the smell that many would have probably found pretty disturbing and uncomfortable.

00:22:55: Others

00:22:55: might've

00:22:56: actually been quite

00:22:56: familiar.

00:22:58: well maybe with both sides but you know like the culinary this dried shrimp might be comforting for people who relate to is a ingredient in comfort foods.

00:23:10: So Asian diasporic people, uh...people who grew up eating Creole cuisine.

00:23:15: But

00:23:16: at the same time

00:23:17: you know there's also this small decaying vermin right?

00:23:20: This idea of like decomposition um and so yeah how intimate do you want to be with this?

00:23:26: Do You Want To Become Part Of The Artwork or vice versa?

00:23:31: Yeah, like become another medium for kind of bringing it into or out the gallery.

00:23:37: Into The World as you know scholars have smell and perfumers knows smells change when people wear them right.

00:23:44: so It actually adds Another dimension Of unpredictability.

00:23:48: And this kind of unruly mixture Right to the work When People who already Have different bodily chemical compositions temperatures,

00:23:58: etc.,

00:23:59: that like they're going to you know put it on and create these new olfactory mixtures if they decide to do so.

00:24:09: And she does talk about it as the kind of

00:24:11: protective balm?

00:24:13: I was thinking...I guess it

00:24:15: raises a question of what does this protect against?

00:24:18: right?

00:24:19: because people- I mean my asthma theory always thought

00:24:26: The so-called miasma theory held that diseases like cholera and plague spread through bad air from decay in filth rather than microbes, linking illnesses to foul smells and poor sanitation.

00:24:39: Though later disproven it inspired major urban cleanliness and sanitation reforms the smell that people take back from Candice Lin's exhibition wards against something else like Sean elaborates.

00:24:52: So I think it protects against racialized discourses of purity, right and like classist discourse

00:24:59: as a purity

00:25:01: but also yeah.

00:25:02: Like the fantasy of kind of impervious body And most of all this idea of colonial unknowing which is termed from an influential essay by Giuliana Hupeghi's Manu Vimalasari and Aliesha Goldstein.

00:25:19: And it's really thinking about how colonialism supports itself and reproduces itself through regimes of unknowing, right?

00:25:29: Also kind of like

00:25:30: by making things

00:25:32: very impossible or unavailable to the senses.

00:25:36: So by shutting down this sense of smell discrediting as a source of knowledge imposing regimes of deodorization It makes it very difficult for say, you know one example would be for racialized migrants to access their collective memories through smell.

00:25:57: the way that like Proust's Madeleine.

00:26:01: In Marcel Proust novel à la réchange du temps perdu The Madelein episode describes how tasting a small shell-shaped cake dipped in tea suddenly and vividly brings back the narrator's childhood memories of Sundays.

00:26:16: This involuntary rush of memory, triggered by taste and smell rather than deliberate effort becomes a model of how the past survives in sensory impressions.

00:26:26: And can unexpectedly resurface opening the way for the whole narrative of lost time to unfold.

00:26:35: One can go at least where I live In The US To many cafes or grocery stores and get a metal end.

00:26:41: Smell it Get some tea like some lime blossom tea

00:26:47: But dried shrimp, I mean.

00:26:48: now it's

00:26:49: much more familiar but its still are a much more common.

00:26:56: And there other materials

00:26:57: like i've written about mustard oil right which was prohibited in Europe and North America for awhile because of its supposed Health effects although we could think about the health effects Of you know all kinds of things that are in all kind of widely accepted and beloved foods.

00:27:17: That's also something that people in Southeast Asia, South Asia are very familiar with.

00:27:24: And then we're unable to access when they were living in these

00:27:28: countries.".

00:27:36: In the end I'm asking Sean does their confrontation with the uncomfortable or probably unconscious through smell might help to unlearn the legacies of colonial capitalism?

00:27:48: This idea like a disgust reaction is you know, neurologically encoded into the brain.

00:27:57: And then cultural components get overlaid on it so that we have this like really visceral response that's tied to human and presumably also many non-human creatures' impulses of disease avoidance right?

00:28:17: But then back gets kind Misrecognized or you know, like we tend to wreck misrecognize culturally stigmatized smells as You Know threats that have liked a kind of disease association with

00:28:31: it.

00:28:32: So I do think

00:28:35: the way that olfactory Aesthetics,

00:28:38: whether

00:28:38: it's artworks or narratives can defamiliarize

00:28:41: our sense of smell.

00:28:43: Or denaturalize that kind of... I mean partly it could create critical distance as many have argued but i think

00:28:51: It also

00:28:52: creates new conditions for smelling in the Candice Lin case like New smells altogether.

00:29:02: That might lead us In other directions and I mean, I guess i'm partly interested in the idea not only of kind of critiquing olfactory violence but these artworks that are really interesting and like olfactory erotics or appeal.

00:29:20: Or what other kinds of relationships can smell move us towards?

00:29:34: like the Toni

00:29:34: Morrison

00:29:35: case, it's calling towards these kind of ancestral knowledges and perhaps a kind of...

00:29:42: Calling toward acknowledgement

00:29:45: just really essential largely de-recognized work of reproductive labor that women in the novel have been doing all along.

00:30:03: Thank you so much!

00:30:03: But

00:30:07: this was shown true about olfactory ecologies in the past conditional at The Olfax Symposium In Vienna for Kultur Denken, podcast of EFK.

00:30:19: Thanks For Listening!