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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
Description: Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. 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.
Dr. Hsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he...