Introduction

The artist and writer Warren Cariou (Métis) concludes his essay “Landsensing” with an olfactory epiphany. Cariou has spent years working intimately with bitumen, “a material that is undeniably messy, toxic, and extremely smelly” that is “extracted in . . . tar sands strip mines, and processed into the gasoline, diesel, and petrochemicals that underwrite the conditions of modern life.”1 He characterizes the “petrographs” (Figure 1) he creates as an effort to repurpose bitumen from the petroleum industry “toward the creative purpose of revealing what is being done to the land of the Athabasca region and the people who are intimately connected with it” (308). Wearing a respirator, Cariou develops bitumen (a photosensitive material) into haunting photographs that document the infrastructures and ecological devastation wrought by petroleum extraction in the Athabasca tar sands region. While this process might seem to double down on realism by incorporating a toxic material from the photographed landscape into the photographic process, the resulting images make the infrastructures and landscapes of extraction appear shadowy and flitting—“evanescent” rather than inevitable.2

While Cariou often describes the smell of bitumen in negative terms (“awful,” “stench,” “almost unbearably acrid and offensive”; “His nose was raw with the fumes”3), he also associates it with a very different memory of material encounter. When gathering bitumen for use in his petrography process, Cariou traversed strip-mined hillsides “suffused in horrible toxic odours and drifting smoke,” then suddenly came upon a lush and pleasant-smelling place:

Here, the mining companies had not come to disturb the surface, and the bitumen was there as it has always been, as part of the natural ecosystem. And the smell there was wonderful. We could sense the bitumen, but it was beautifully mingled with the other scents of fresh rain, new spring growth, and blooming wild roses. And now when I smell the raw, unprocessed bitumen in my petrography studio, I remember the gorgeous place it came from, and I think about the Indigenous people of the Athabasca region who, according to legend, used bitumen for generation after generation to seal their birchbark canoes and other vessels. And in that smell, I think I can sense a possibility of a different relationship with this material, which has been treated with such disrespect for more than a century. I even imagine that the bitumen might be used for healing purposes, if we can learn the sensory skills and the teachings that the material has to give us. (323)

The “wonderful” smell of naturally occurring bitumen embedded in a complex and balanced web of relations reminds us that toxic landscapes are not inevitable and that toxicity (as well as malodor) inheres more in modes of relation than in materials themselves. Cariou wears a respirator when working with bitumen because “I have to treat it with respect” (322). By contrast, toxicity is the necessary, disavowed outcome of capitalist processes of extraction, production, and consumption that forego respectful relations, unevenly exposing humans and more-than-human communities to a growing range of bioaccumulating risks. The shift in Cariou’s perspective resonates with anthropologist Zoe Todd’s (Métis) concept of “fossil kin,”4 which reframes petrochemicals as kin who have been “weaponized” by petro-capitalism and whom we should relate to differently. Cariou concludes his essay on a speculative note: the surprisingly pleasant smell of bitumen in its “natural ecosystem” attunes him to other, respectful ways of relating to bitumen and to the land with which it is entangled.

Having written a book about smell as a medium for engaging with environmental violence, I was struck by the way Cariou’s olfactory encounter challenges our expectations about the smell of bitumen, prying it loose from petro-capitalist processes that have positioned it as a material closely associated with ecological devastation and environmental racism. In addition to framing scent as a medium of atmospheric injustice, writers and artists like Cariou engage with the reparative work that smell can do in contexts of environmental harm. In their works, smells incite collective memory, impel smellers towards suppressed intimacies, and disclose alternate worlds. Encounters with such works have prompted me to revisit olfactory art and writing through the conceptual framework of worldmaking.

Olfactory Worldmaking argues that scent is a powerful and often overlooked medium of worldmaking. Whereas research on smell tends to focus on its empirical and psychological impacts and on how it is invoked to shore up social boundaries, I approach smell as an experience that shapes our sense of present and possible worlds. In framing smell as a medium, I emphasize not only its capacity to communicate meanings, memories, and affects, but its resonance with theories of “elemental media” that, following John Durham Peters, conceptualize media in expansive terms as “vessels and environments, containers of possibility” or as “our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are.”5 How does smell attune us to possibilities for shaping more livable worlds, and how can it make sensible alternative modes of being and relating? Building on critical accounts of environmental violence, I focus on smell’s capacities for communicating relationality on material, embodied, visceral, and volatile registers that have been suppressed by liberalism’s ocularcentric “distribution of the sensible.”6 To better understand how smell nuances and extends relations across time and space, I consider olfactory projects that, like Cariou’s petrography, offer speculative responses to the atmospheric violence that enables—and is produced by—racial and colonial capitalism. These projects—which range from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual artworks and experimental perfumes—orient us toward new understandings of smell as an open-ended medium of communication and relation.

My focus on olfactory worldmaking builds on conversations across multiple disciplines that have interrogated worldmaking as a concept attuned to aesthetic engagements with speculation and ontology. Scholars of art and literature (especially science fiction and fantasy) have found inspiration in philosopher Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), which argued that symbolic activity plays a powerful role in making and remaking the world we inhabit.7 Goodman’s work expands the stakes of art and literature by showing how our ways of noticing project and realize different worlds: for example, it informs Mark Jerng’s understanding of racial worldmaking as the “narrative and interpretive strategies that shape how readers notice race so as to build, anticipate, and organize the world.”8

Looking beyond Goodman’s anthropocentric focus on symbolic activity, environmental humanities scholars have taken up phenomenologies and multispecies networks that decenter the human. Building on Jakob von Uexküll’s inquiry into the perceptual worlds of nonhuman species,9 posthuman framings of worldmaking range from Anna Tsing’s ethnography of matsutake-pine-human assemblages (“Making worlds is not limited to humans”10) to Donna Haraway’s assertion that “Ontologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding.”11 It is important to note, however, that this turn to New Materialist and more-than-human ontologies in the environmental humanities is not unprecedented: as Zoe Todd notes, theorists of the ontological turn often appropriate or obscure longstanding Indigenous “cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations.”12

In the fields of Indigenous studies and critical ethnic studies, worldmaking orients expansive frameworks for understanding aesthetic and political practices that lay the groundwork for alternative, decolonial futures. Discussions of Indigenous cosmologies—and on Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism’s world-ending worldmaking—offers vital insights into decolonial ecologies: for example, Candace Fujikane details how “Kānaka Maoli are restoring the worlds where their attunement to climatic change and their capacity for kilo adaptation, regeneration, and transformation will enable them to survive what capital cannot.”13 Black feminist scholars have developed groundbreaking theories of worldmaking beyond the terms of the human, oriented by Sylvia Wynter’s critique of a post-Columbian worldview that centered a racialized, colonial, and gendered conception of “Man.”14 Research on “imaginative practices of worlding,” “working-class Black migrant worldmaking” and archives of “black alternative world-making” have situated black cultural production as an endeavor to imagine and realize worlds that refuse the terms of liberal, antiblack humanism.15 As Kevin Quashie observes, black pessimist thinkers have theorized “black ontology both as an impossibility in the logic of the antiblack world and as a possibility that requires perceiving differently what the world is or looks like or can be—worldmaking.”16 Interdisciplinary research on worldmaking also builds on the foundational work of the queer Latinx studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, whose argument “that minoritarian performance labors to make worlds—worlds of transformative politics and possibilities” reframed the stakes of embodied queer-of-color performativity in both theatrical contexts and everyday rituals.17 Worldmaking is a creative and necessary response to the necropolitical “death-worlds” propagated by colonial and racial capitalism: as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) writes in a recent exchange with black feminist scholar Robyn Maynard, “Imperialism and ongoing colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence, and Indigenous and black peoples have been building worlds and then rebuilding worlds for as long as we have been in existence.”18

Sensory experience plays a vital and often underexamined role in theories of worldmaking. In his phenomenological account of “the animatedness of the perceptual world,” David Abram argues that reattuning to “the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience” can recuperate connections to “the living landscape” that have been eroded by modernization.19 But sensory worldmaking is not circumscribed by nostalgia for premodern sensory capacities—it also encompasses the affective and relational possibilities afforded by extraordinary, transgressive, or more-than-human sensory experiences. Anna Tsing opens The Mushroom at the End of the World with an evocative description of the “autumn aroma” that draws foragers, eaters, and scholars alike into the matsutake mushroom’s worldmaking assemblages.20 In a recent interdisciplinary collaboration, Melody Jue et al. develop a speculative and synaesthetic approach to translating the underwater “chemosensory worlds of kelp forest organisms.”21 Muñoz extended his work on queer-of-color worldmaking by introducing the concept of a shared “sense of brown”—an affective route encompassing “multiple modes of being, feeling, and knowing in the world.”22 Black feminist scholar Tiffany Lethabo King notes that black and Indigenous worldmaking cannot happen without new sensory comportments: “new world-making practices require pores, skin, bone, touch, erotics, and new haptic modes that change our relations to notions of the human as an ordered sovereign, bounded, raced, and settled individual.”23 King’s emphasis on sensorial worldmaking practices refuses ocularcentric conceptions of future-thinking as “visionary” or even “speculative,” instead moving us toward futures premised on embodied sensation. Even Goodman’s foundational discussion of worldmaking methods also acknowledges the importance of sensory recalibration, suggesting that cultural products that attune us to “shared or sharable forms, colors, feelings . . . induce reorganization of our accustomed world in accordance with these features.”24 Worldmaking occurs not only through the discursive or representational production of new ideologies but also through interventions in liberal humanism’s sensorial order—an order that is produced by both the normative education of the senses and the distribution of sensory stimuli across differentiated spaces. Just as recalibrating our attention can enable different, more intricate relations to the world, changing what is available to be sensed in everyday environments (for example, through olfactory prohibitions or critical perfuming practices) can recalibrate our sensory habits.

Though it often goes unnoticed, olfactory worldmaking happens all the time, wherever there are humans or nonhumans with working olfactory receptors—our only sensory neurons that are directly exposed to the environment. Smelling is a visceral, trans-corporeal process that takes in emanations from the environment and from nearby bodies: as philosopher Gaston Bachelard puts it, “Odors are the first evidence of our fusion with the world.”25 The recent spread of temporary or prolonged anosmia as a symptom of Covid-19 (whose uneven impacts were compounded by preexisting vulnerabilities resulting from race, class, and colonialism) has presented extensive evidence of the importance of smell as a capacity for making connections with the world. Along with data that correlate loss of smell with heightened rates of depression, apathy, loss of appetite, and suicidal ideation, firsthand accounts emphasize a sense of environmental disconnectedness: “The world is very blank. Or if not blank, shades of decay. I feel alien from myself. It’s also a kind of loneliness in the world.”26 Although experiences of acquired anosmia highlight extreme cases of sensory disconnectedness, they also suggest that those of us who frequent largely deodorized spaces may have already become acclimated to an attenuated range of olfactory relations.

The sensory historian Constance Classen’s discussion of the olfactory “cosmology” of the indigenous Ongee people who reside in Little Andaman Island demonstrates that the marginalization of smell in Western, colonial modernity is a culturally specific condition that upholds a culturally specific way of understanding the world. “For the Ongee,” writes Classen, “smell is the fundamental cosmic principle. Odour is the source of personal identity and the reason for living in society, a system of medicine and a system of communication; it determines temporal and spatial movements, it produces life and death.”27 By contrast, the worldmaking methods that Goodman singles out—composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and supplementation, and deformation—bring into focus how liberal humanism’s sensorial interventions (for example, devaluing the sense of smell, deleting stigmatized odors, imposing hedonic metrics onto olfactory experience, or extracting of scents for use in perfumes) contribute to worldmaking by both controlling odors and devaluing our sense of smell. Even within this attenuated sensorium, however, smell remains a powerful interface for what Erica Fretwell calls “sensory world making.”28 Fretwell develops this concept in a provocative reflection prompted by Bruno Latour’s essay about the olfactory sensitization kits used to train perfumers: “to explore the proximities of lived and literary genres is to posit literature as a technology or ‘kit’ that has the potential to reproduce—not copy but produce more—feeling and, in the key of radical empiricism, to create more connections to the world by registering more differences in it.”29

Attuning to olfactory connections to the world is challenging, because they run askew of the prevailing norms of deodorization and olfactory differentiation that underpin liberal humanist worldmaking. Deodorization—which encompasses not only histories of sanitation infrastructure and hygiene but also the marginalization of olfaction in the Enlightenment’s ocularcentric sensorium30—responded to the immersive, unruly, and embodied qualities of olfactory experience by producing spaces and subjective states aligned with liberal fictions of autonomy, rational separation, and disembodied thought. Deodorization campaigns were not just a matter of public health—they helped establish liberalism’s commonsense conceptions of the human (its disembodied mind, its sensory hierarchy, the empty Cartesian spatial expanses it inhabits and governs) and its others (who supposedly could not attain “mastery over their own sensory, irrational nature”).31 As Kandice Chuh explains in The Difference Aesthetics Makes, “This partitioning of the sensible, which is the common sense, determines the boundaries of the community (who belongs) and who may speak in and for it (who is authorized).”32 Moreover, modern processes of deodorization have always been unevenly distributed, and, as a result, black, Indigenous, and people of color are disproportionately exposed to noxious atmospheres and the “toxic worlding” they entail.33

As an alternative to this liberal humanist worldmaking and the violence it perpetuates, Chuh calls for “aesthetic inquiry unconfident in the primacy of the visual” and open to the unruly “potentiality embedded in an encounter with an object that appeals in extraordinary ways to the senses.”34 What critical methods would do justice to such extraordinary sensory encounters—to “the possibilities of worldmaking . . . feeling the touch between things, the new, odd, unfamiliar movements that become possible in the encounter”?35 In her study of shadows and noise as “sensual forms of knowing,” Amber Jamilla Musser argues for a method that centers situated, embodied knowledge and critical attunement—“knowledge about the feelings, sensations, geographies, and temporalities that comprise the densely layered now of empire as well as knowledge about the worlds that exceed it.”36

If olfactory worldmaking is oriented by critique of the injustices and produced gaps in memory, knowledge, and sensation that perpetuate racial and colonial capitalism, it also calls for reparative modes of study—such as description, immersive participation, speculation, and attunement37—that are informed by the understandings of racial and colonial violence produced by scholarly methods of “critique” and “damage-centered analysis.”38 For Tsing, multispecies relations demand that we retune sensory habits that have been entrained by capitalist and anthropocentric values: “World-making projects emerge from practical activities of making lives; in the process these projects alter our planet. To see them, in the shadow of the Anthropocene’s ‘anthropo-,’ we must reorient our attention.”39 At times, the most challenging task is to notice and describe sensory relations and theoretical implications that are already present in a text: as Robyn Maynard puts it, “What kind of world-making, what kind of livingness do we see emerging, as always-already in the works, from the past-present Black and Indigenous traditions of radicalism, resistance, and co-resistance?”40 Attuning to illiberal modes of sensorial worldmaking is difficult, because it requires both “unlearning”41 established modes of attention and acknowledging when particular sensory associations are unavailable or only discursively available to the situated, embodied critic. Description—of both embodied sensory experiences and the worldmaking they take part in—is also a demanding practice when it refuses the presumed separation of subject and object: “If we understand description as enhanced attention, we can direct that attention inward and outward, to how we describe as well as what we describe.”42

Critical attention to sensorial worldmaking offers an alternative to the extractive impetus that underlies conventional frameworks for olfactory research—for example, the tendency to evaluate smell according to hedonic metrics, behavioral analyses focusing on how scents affect productivity or consumer behavior, and the fragrance industry’s reliance on literal processes of odor extraction.43 Hedonic and behavioral approaches substitute quantitative and frequently decontextualized data for modes of olfactory knowledge that are oriented by collective memory and relational ecologies. Extractive logics can even shape practices of olfactory writing, as when perfume writers single out efficacious scent components so that they can be described, synthesized, preserved, exchanged, remixed, and so forth. Following the Stó:lō sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson’s critique of settler colonialism’s imposition of “hungry listening” (a method of listening that “prioritizes the capture and certainty of information over the affective feel, timbre, touch, and texture of sound”), we might consider how racial and colonial capitalism supplements its demand for deodorization with acquisitive modes of smelling focused on capturing information about olfactory materials and responses.44 Smelling alone is not a sufficient response to imperatives of deodorization and olfactory capture: it is necessary to focus not just on the unruly characteristics of smell but specifically on how scents disclose (or enact) human and more-than-human relations, and how they communicate otherwise worlds. Instead of merely teaching us to be more discerning about scent, olfactory aesthetics can train us to discern—and, when appropriate, participate in—projects of sensorial worldmaking.

Like the writers and artists considered in this book, I am especially interested in how smell can refuse liberal norms of communicability and transparency. Those who work closely with scent are well aware of the irreducible aspects of olfactory perception, which varies not just with different odorants but with the sensory and cultural predispositions (as well as the individual nasal microbiomes) of different smellers. Contra efforts to reduce or systematize it, smell frequently manifests as an encounter with opacity. As Édouard Glissant argues, a “right to opacity”—which the demand for difference to render itself legible—can provide the basis for modes of relation premised not on liberal humanist conceptions of universality but on divergence: “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. . . . There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement, referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities.”45 The qualities of olfaction that incline toward opacity—such as its subjectivity, elusiveness, resistance to language, and variance according to individual and collective memories—make scent a capacious medium for exploring modes of relation and community that refuse to relinquish irreducible differences through assimilation.46

Smell shapes collective worlds both locally and across a range of geographic and temporal scales. These relations range from interpersonal and multispecies intimacies to the diasporic enactment of an “alternative sensorium” that anthropologist Lisa Law describes among Filipina migrant workers who gather weekly in Hong Kong’s “Little Manila,” to the olfactory inclinations that the perfumer Tanaïs treats as intergenerationally inherited vasanas.47 The scent of sandalwood essential oil has vastly different worldmaking implications for different breathers: for a settler yoga practitioner, it might serve as a reminder to keep their mind “in the present”; for the Kanaka Maoli scholar and graphic artist Rae Ke’ala Kuruhara, reflecting on the scent of sandalwood (‘iliahi) forests decimated by colonial trade and tourism, it evokes a lost and yet potentially resurgent world in which “there must have been a sense of embodiment, like you were wearing the air of the forest with you as it entangled with your own odor.”48 Interventions in smellscapes—whether through fragrance-free policies (which can contribute to creating spaces of care for activist worldmaking)49 or the introduction of socially marginalized scents into deodorized spaces—have the potential to more equitably redistribute these olfactory cues for embodied experiences of intimacy, memory, and community that can extend across spatial and generational boundaries.

Understanding smell as a medium for reparative worldmaking expands the stakes of olfactory aesthetics. Scholars often frame the political interventions of olfactory texts and artworks as efforts to expose environmental injustice and to evoke sympathy across social and spatial divides;50 worldmaking draws attention, instead, to the expansive modes of affect and relation catalyzed by scent. Because smell is irreducibly material and often extends across cultural and species boundaries, olfactory art involves a multitude of relations between the artwork, the breather’s personal and cultural olfactory histories, their preexisting microbiome and chemical body burden, substances already present in the atmosphere, and the air emitted by everyone else in the space. Haraway’s “sympoeisis”—in which “Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings”—evokes the collaborative and convivial nature of these relations more effectively than liberal notions of sympathy.51 Olfactory projects can reproduce existing worlds—namely, modernity’s uneven, atmospherically segregated spaces in which commodified fragrances signal prestige; but they can also unravel them, drawing attention to other modes of relation, communication, atmospheric composition, and more-than-human intimacy. Olfactory worldmaking bridges the separation of texts from the world: it is not just representational but inherently participatory. It prompts us to work toward transforming both atmospheric injustices and our attenuated olfactory sensitivities, and to immerse ourselves in smell as a medium of more-than-human relation and reciprocity.

To understand how cultural works engage with smell on both representational and nonrepresentational52 registers, this book studies a range of olfactory forms: memoirs oriented by scent, experiments in decolonial perfuming, multimodal art installations, and speculative fiction. These works center the worldmaking activity of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), feminist, queer, and migrant breathers—those who often find themselves marginalized and rendered precarious within modernity’s differentially deodorized atmospheres.53 They envision and enact creative and more livable modes of “air conditioning”—philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s term for the conditioning of air that unevenly conditions human and nonhuman lives.54 These works also upend the liberal sensorium by centering smell as a powerful medium for remaking human and more-than-human relations. In these works, olfactory speculation attunes us to both derecognized pasts and alternate futures—it weaves embodied BIPOC memories into webs of kinship and reciprocity.

The chapters that follow foreground how sensorial worldmaking pushes us to rethink concepts—smellscape, microclimate, and speculative narrative—whose implications stretch across multiple disciplines, interdisciplines, and practices. Chapter 1, “Fragrant Time: Smellscape as Distributed Memory,” reconsiders J. Douglas Porteous’s influential concept of smellscape from the perspectives of Indigenous and diasporic breathers. Whereas Porteous relies on the accounts of white European men describing unfamiliar, exotic smellscapes, I center the sensory projects of Indigenous writers and the queer, Bangladeshi-American perfumer Tanaïs. Through close engagement with these works, I rethink smellscape as an atmospheric distribution of memory and affective capacities that has important implications for Indigenous and migrant communities who often have limited or culturally stigmatized access to scents that evoke memories on both personal and collective, transgenerational scales.

Chapter 2, “Conjuring Black Microclimates,” builds on Christina Sharpe’s discussion of “microclimates” that sustain black life amid modernity’s antiblack atmospheres. I focus on how the aromatic media of conjure or “hoodoo”—incense, roots, powders, sachets, candles—supported the lives of black diasporic practitioners by materializing connections across the vast geographies of the Black Atlantic, the circum-Caribbean, and the Great Migration. After discussing historical accounts of conjure’s olfactory elements, I turn to two works that take conjure as an occasion for speculative narrative: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Renée Stout’s Tales of the Conjure Woman. Morrison’s novel—often read as a reimagining of the legend of the Flying African—presents the scent of sweet ginger as alternate mode of taking to the air, associated with black women’s practices of care and healing. Stout’s multimodal installation presents roots and perfumes as components within an overarching narrative of black feminist erotic and community empowerment. The microclimates of conjure offer a compelling example of the reparative and future-oriented implications of interventions in the atmospheric distribution of memory and affect.

Chapter 3, “Sensorial Estrangement: Smelling Otherwise Worlds,” focuses on “sensorial estrangement” as a capacious aspect of “cognitive estrangement,” which has often been overlooked by scholars who overemphasize science fiction’s “hard,” technoscientific interventions.55 Attending to speculative narratives that throw our sensory habits and expectations off balance—and that build worlds from otherwise sensory arrangements—draws attention to embodied modes of relation that have often been overlooked by scholars who overemphasize the techno-scientific and cognitive estrangements of “hard” science fiction. To convey the range and aesthetic complexity of smell as a subject of sensorial estrangement, this chapter discusses a series of speculative works that redistribute the sensorium in ways that foreground how olfaction solicits more-than-human intimacies. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis and Fledgling and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl explore both the affordances and contradictions of smell as a chemical medium that provokes—and at times compels—queer, interspecies modes of eroticism and reproduction. Anicka Yi’s Tate Modern exhibition, In Love with the World extends Butler’s and Lai’s concerns into the domain of embodied AI by putting gallery visitors into relation with flying biobots who sense and relate to human and nonhuman bodies—and to a series of carefully crafted scents—in evolving, unpredictable ways.