1. Fragrant Time: Smellscape as Distributed Memory

Whose Smellscapes?

Porteous makes a compelling case for olfaction as both a method and object of spatial inquiry. Whereas geographers have been preoccupied with the sense of vision—with making and reading maps intended to render space as transparent, homogeneous, and fixed—olfaction is incompatible with the visual distance and abstraction required by Western cartographic practice. Where “landscape” reduced land, sea, and sky to the placid conventions of the picturesque—a genre that contributed to the naturalization of colonial conquest3—“smellscape” appeals to perhaps our most embodied, involuntary, and visceral sensory capacity. Smell refuses the ideals of order, perspectival stability, and proportion associated with landscape—any smellscape, Porteous writes, “will be non-continuous, fragmentary in space, and episodic in time” (91). Far from merely supplementing visual geographies, smellscape draws our attention to a wholly different mode of inhabiting time and space.

Despite his attention to the immersive qualities of smell, however, Porteous’s reflections on smellscape rely heavily on the descriptions of sensorially distanced outsiders. Because immersion quickly brings on the “habituation effect” (where salient smells fade into the imperceptible background), Porteous claims that “almost all literary descriptions of smells (with the important exception of childhood memories, which are distanced in time rather than space) are the work of non-residents” (90); he thus claims that “Almost invariably . . . odorous descriptions are the work of outsiders” (94). This privileging of olfactory outsiders helps contextualize Porteous’s considerable influence on studies of tourist and heritage smellscapes, which center the perspectives of travelers and present-day audiences interested in recuperating past smellscapes (often for the purpose of preserving or fabricating a sense of local or national identity that can marginalize or appropriate the experience of Indigenous and migrant communities).

Because he attributes these imbalances in olfactory discourse to “habituation” rather than power, Porteous is uncritical about the elisions that shape his archive—the fact that the “outsiders” whose published olfactory observations he cites are predominantly white men embedded in imperialist networks. Despite his interest in the spatial aspects of scent, Porteous’s sources dwell on bodily odors, or how “personal smells vary according to race, ethnicity, culture, age, sex, and class.” Although he notes that “it may no longer be appropriate to mention the highly-differentiated smells of the basic human racial groups,” he goes on to do just that, citing Graham Greene’s account of the smell of Liberian trekkers in the bush. Claiming that “Native African writers . . . rarely supply significant smell descriptions,” Porteous centers white men as discriminating sensors while trafficking in essentializing accounts of “Third World” and “ethnic” smells: “No account of India, from Kipling to the recent popular novels of M. M. Kaye and the accounts of Geoffrey Moorhouse and the Naipauls, fails to invoke the peculiar smell of that subcontinent [sic] a mixture of dung, sweat, heat, dust, rotting vegetation, and spices” (94).

As Porteous articulates it, smellscape becomes an uncritical map of power relations and a tool of racial and geopolitical differentiation. “The Third World,” he writes, “has its distinctive smell regions. One may distinguish Cuernavaca from Cairo, from Calcutta, from Canton by the nose alone” (95). By contrast, Porteous presents a much more granular, nostalgic discussion of historical Western smellscapes. For example, he details smells that would have been “experienced on a cyclical basis” in European towns: from wash day, baking day, and haymaking time to various holidays, “English villages sixty years ago abounded in seasonal odors” (99). Despite his assumption that colonial smellscapes are best described by metropolitan “outsiders,” Porteous assumes that European sources (with their “insider” noses) are nevertheless competent to provide nuanced descriptions of their own smellscapes. This juxtaposition of Europe’s past smells with contemporary “Third World” smellscapes is shaped by a logic of temporal othering4 that imagines colonial and postcolonial places and scents to be sealed off from developmental time. In casting such locations as repositories of olfactory experiences that have been eroded by the “blandscapes” of Western modernity, Porteous implies that modernization has been a teleological process of deodorization, rather than a messy and environmentally violent process of differential deodorization whereby racial capitalism extracts commodified fragrances from post/colonial plantations while displacing noxious industrial odors and other “externalities” to poorer and less powerful communities worldwide.

Despite these problems, Porteous’s central point about the worldmaking implications of smellscape remains more relevant than ever: “to retain a rich, placeful world, individuals must come to appreciate the sensuous complexity of their environments” (104). His insight about the emotive ties between smell and sense of place seems especially vital for those whose sensory and affective experience have been targeted by colonial and racial capitalism—not for the Western European travelers at the center of Porteous’s essay, but for racialized, colonized, postcolonial, and migrant breathers immersed in uneven, often violent smellscapes. Rethinking smellscape as distributed memory shifts our attention from the uneven distribution of airborne toxins to another dimension of atmospheric harm, and of potential repair: the olfactory media that evoke embodied memories in evanescent, unpredictable, yet culturally patterned ways.

Distributed Memory

The concept of distributed memory builds on recent research in distributed cognition, actor-network theory, and New Materialism. This work demonstrates that our cognitive, affective, and agential capacities are not constrained to individual propensities—instead, they are often shaped by continuous interactions between and among human and nonhuman actants. In his influential essay, “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds,” cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins explains that, in a commercial airliner cockpit, memory processes occur at the interfaces between people and their equipment:

Memory is normally thought of as a psychological function internal to the individual. However, memory tasks in the cockpit may be accomplished by functional systems which transcend the boundaries of the individual actor. Memory processes may be distributed among human agents, or between human agents and external representational devices.5

Memory is not limited to the notion of an individual subject accessing information stored in their brain. Instead, it is a continuous and interactive process oriented by a range of instruments, and by constant communication between people interfacing with different instruments (and with the cockpit’s air). As Hutchins’s title suggests, the “subject” of memory here is not an individual but the entire system of humans and carefully positioned instruments that make up the cockpit.

In The Scent of Time, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han reflects on a very different apparatus technological arrangement for distributed cognition: the incense clock, a device for measuring time widely used in China before the twentieth century. Han contrasts the incense clock—which employs fragrance to orient cognition toward an experience of temporal stillness—with Western modernity’s accelerative conception of time as a progression of disconnected moments. Where mechanical clocks enact time as homogeneous and empty, the incense clock materializes time as radiant scent and lingering ash. “Fragrant time does not flow or trickle away. Nothing is emptied. Rather, the scent of the incense fills the room, even turns time into space; it thus gives it a semblance of duration.”6 For Han, this materialization of time as something held in the atmosphere offers a contemplative alternative to capitalist modernity’s drive toward acceleration and haste. “A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations toward change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.”7 In Han’s account, time is not an abstract concept in the user’s mind—instead, it is a lived experience oriented by the scents of slowly burning pine and cedar. The perception of time inheres in the interface between the perceiver and the incense clock. We could say that the breather inhales the scent of duration and metabolizes it into a radically different mode of inhabiting time and memory.

Scents are characterized by duration—they take place in time and often evoke memories of other times. As Han notes, the most celebrated example of the powerful neurological links between scent and memory is Marcel Proust’s encounter with a madeleine dipped in tisane in Swann’s Way. In Proust’s account, the visceral senses of smell and taste remain “a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest . . . [bearing] in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”8 While critics typically focus on how scent evokes the lost world of childhood in this passage, it is also a scene of private recollection and olfactory consumption with suggestive implications for mental health: not only is it literally about consuming food and drink in the privacy of a bourgeois home, but it also figures scent as a “tiny and almost impalpable drop of . . . essence”—as a drop of distillate or essential oil. This chemosensory experience immediately uplifts the narrator’s mood and sense of self: “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?”

Several aspects of olfactory memory get sidelined in this overrepresented Proustian scene. Although the scene has become synonymous with the concept of mémoire involontaire, the encounter with the madeleine is pleasurable and voluntary. Individual consumption occludes the political questions provoked by olfactory encounters that involve ambient odors or other involuntary exposures, as well as traumatic sensory triggers. Proust also foregrounds private memory associations, without attending to smell as a medium for collective memory or more expansive historical relations—for example, the madeleine’s eighteenth-century origin as one of the many sweets concocted to feature the product of Caribbean sugar plantations. Philosopher Larry Shiner suggests that the overrepresentation of the madeleine draws attention away from “those odor memories that connect us to others rather than provide private epiphanies waiting to be transformed into art.”9 A relatively familiar food in much of the West, the madeleine also overshadows the many underrepresented and frequently inaccessible scents that, if available, would powerfully evoke embodied memories for displaced Indigenous and migrant breathers.

The opening scene of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake (2003), offers an instructive counterpoint to Proust’s madeleine. In the kitchen of her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli struggles to recreate jhal muri—a popular Kolkata street food—using Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts. “She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix . . . a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing.”10 Here, the cultural memory imperfectly evoked by an approximated recipe takes on added significance in the context of reproduction: the missing ingredient—mustard oil—suggests that her child will be cut off from a meaningful sensory experience connected to Ashima’s memories of Kolkata.

Mustard oil—an ancient, common, and culturally significant ingredient widely used in Asian (especially South Asian) cuisines—was prohibited for culinary use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1989 due to high concentrations of erucic acid (which was associated with cardiological health issues in lab rats); its consumption is also highly regulated in the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand. Critics of these regulations have noted that other products containing erucic acid—such as canola oil and prepared mustard—have not been similarly restricted.11 For migrants in the United States whose memories of home and childhood are associated with the pungent smell of mustard oil, Ashima Ganguli’s sense of “something missing” is a common experience. For them, the scent and flavor of mustard oil could be as evocative as Proust’s madeleine—it could help them weave connections between memories, places, and experiences that have been fractured by personal and collective histories of migration (and, in many cases, of war, trauma, and compelled cultural assimilation). While migrants might encounter madeleines and herbal teas in Western food spaces, they are much less likely to encounter mustard oil—at least not legally. Yet, ironically, mustard oil may be freely used in incongruous spaces such as bathrooms or massage studios: in the United States, it is labeled as a body product “for external use only.”12

Smellscapes are not just spatial—they are suffused with time and with heterogeneous, lived geographies. They enable and occlude memories—both individual and collective—in ways that are idiosyncratic and unpredictable, yet culturally patterned. The differential availability, legality, stigmatization, and valorization of smells in both private and public spaces has profound implications for people’s capacity to encounter and experience atmospheric manifestations of memory and affect—and thus for mental and physical health, cultural continuity, and social relations. Whose olfactive memories are carried in public and private atmospheres, and whose are prohibited, eradicated, or stigmatized? How might this framing of smellscapes as distributed memory prompt us to rethink the stakes of olfactory politics and olfactory design? What are its implications for writers and scent designers who aim to support the collective memory and cultural resilience of BIPOC? Writings by Indigenous and migrant authors explore these questions by staging olfactory encounters as sites of struggle over embodied modes of memory and relation.

Olfactory Anagnorisis

While Lahiri’s account of jhal muri with “something missing” illustrates how hegemonic smellscapes unevenly distribute material supports of memory, literature by BIPOC authors also includes powerful scenes of odor-induced remembrance. Like Proust’s encounter with the madeleine, these moments of olfactory recognition often occur at narrative turning points. For Indigenous and migrant breathers, however, access to memory is all the more vital because it can enable reconnection with modes of historical and cultural knowledge that have been deliberately eroded by schools, media, and other institutions of liberal common sense.

I would like to introduce the term olfactory anagnorisis to highlight the formal and political implications of these scenes of olfactory recollection. Aristotle’s Poetics defines anagnorisis as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.”13 Usually translated as “recognition,” anagnorisis derives from the prefix ana- (back, again) and gnōrizein (to make known). The prefix suggests a return to knowledge that has been lost or forgotten, implying that there has been a process of forgetting or agnosia (ignorance). In BIPOC literature—and especially in Indigenous literature—olfactory anagnorisis enables both a recovery from a state of unknowing and critical understanding of the forces that produced unknowing.

In the formal device of anagnorisis, sensory perception and sensuous knowledge intersect with recent critical conversations about racial and colonial capitalism’s reliance on the production of “colonial unknowing”—Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein’s term for “an epistemological orientation that works to preempt relational modes of analysis.”14 These scholars draw on Jodi Byrd’s (Chickasaw) theorization of “colonial agnosia,” a pervasive and normalized colonial condition that “entails trouble assembling elements of an image into an understandable whole, and difficulty in grasping the relationship of objects to one another.”15 Byrd’s term, agnosia, references a neurological condition involving the inability to recognize objects based on normally functioning sensory perceptions. This suggests that colonial unknowing is generated by sensory disconnection—or, in Rancière’s terms, a distribution of the sensible that occludes both colonial relations and alternative modes of sensing.16 As Christy Spackman argues in her work on water sanitation infrastructures, understanding historical dynamics of “agnotology” (or the study of the production of absences of knowledge) requires careful attention to the labor and infrastructures that generate absences or disavowals of sensory experience.17

Lee Maracle’s (Stó:lō) novel, Celia’s Song (2014), presents a striking account of how settler smellscapes produce colonial agnosia. Maracle depicts a group of Stó:lō women struggling to survive the varied effects of settler colonialism, which include epidemics, ecological colonialism, residential schools, land seizures, criminalization, suicides, violence against women, child abuse, hunger, depression, drug abuse, and the prohibition of ceremony. Maracle characterizes settler genocide in atmospheric terms by drawing attention to how the settler state’s regulation of wood gathering has transformed the familiar smells of Stó:lō homes: “The old houses were cedar planked. . . . The walls soaked up smells, held them, and layered one smell over the next until the smells of the day before and the days after created a unique blend of the family’s favourite foods.”18 For Maracle, a smellscape suffused with cedar functions as atmospherically diffused capacity to access memories, stories, and teachings essential to what Kyle Powys Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi) calls “collective continuance.” As Whyte writes, “collective continuance is a community’s capacity to be adaptive in ways sufficient for the livelihoods of its members to flourish into the future.”19 If “the very smell of [homes] marked the caring of the women,” then the loss of cedar—along with the olfactory effects of central heating, “cleaning agents and air fresheners”—has eroded the generations of care work accumulated in the walls of Stó:lō homes. This olfactory transformation—which should be situated within historical processes of olfactory disorientation wrought by ecological colonialism, forced relocation, residential schools, and carceral spaces—threatens the role of memory and story as repositories of future-oriented knowledge: “Sometimes memory gets stuck in some sort of soup inside my mind and only the right scent will dislodge it. Stirring the soup can help you recall the story, the teaching that is going to solve this trouble, this terrible moment, and now those smells are gone. The smells are gone from the roadside, the hillside, and the houses, and I just can’t remember anymore” (60–61). If smell as a public, atmospheric support of memory situates people in collective time, Maracle draws attention to the deracinating cultural and psychological effects of settler colonialism’s reshaping of lived atmospheres: “How in the world can you change the smells of someone else’s world?” Celia’s Song goes on to recount how characters cleanse and remake this settler smellscape—suffused with the “scent of death,” a “licence to kill that hangs in the air like a stench”—through cedar smudging and smokehouse ceremonies attuned to the material and spiritual interconnections between people and the atmospheres they inhabit (61, 23, 159, emphases in original).

In Indigenous literature, olfactory anagnorisis activates memory, affect, and knowledge across multiple scales. Extending far beyond the relations between human individuals emphasized in Aristotle’s account of anagnorisis, olfactory encounters like Warren Cariou’s epiphany (discussed in the opening paragraphs of this book) evoke memories of place, ceremony, cosmology, and ecological reciprocity that orient characters and readers toward alternate futures. In E. Pauline Johnson’s story “As It Was in the Beginning” (1913), for example, a young Cree woman named Esther is taken to a mission school, where she is indoctrinated in the colonial unknowing of settler culture and falls in love with Laurence, the priest’s white nephew. In a pivotal scene, a familiar scent reanimates Esther’s childhood memories:

And then one night the feeling overcame me. I was in the Hudson’s Bay store when an Indian came in from the north with a large pack of buckskin. As they unrolled it a dash of its insinuating odor filled the store. I went over and leaned above the skins a second, then buried my face in them, swallowing, drinking the fragrance of them, that went to my head like wine. Oh, the wild wonder of that wood-smoked tan, the subtlety of it, the untamed smell of it! I drank it into my lungs, my innermost being was saturated with it, till my mind reeled and my heart seemed twisted with a physical agony. My childhood recollections rushed upon me, devoured me. I left the store in a strange, calm frenzy, and going rapidly to the mission house I confronted my Father Paul and demanded to be allowed to go “home,” if only for a day.20

The priest, Father Paul, refuses Esther’s request to visit her home because he wishes to keep her away from “pagan influences.” But the scent of smoke-tanned skins remains with her, and not long after, after Esther hears Father Paul advising his nephew not to marry her because she is “the daughter of a pagan Indian,” she kills the nephew with a poisoned arrow and returns home.21 The overwhelming scent of the buckskins functions not just as a reminder of Esther’s identity and her suppressed relations—it also subliminally guides her to the buckskin dress she had worn to the mission school as a child, in which her mother had hidden the poisoned arrow in case of future need.

Scent-based memories also play a vital role for Indigenous people displaced by processes of colonial dispossession. Makerita Urale’s (Samoa) Frangipani Perfume (1997), “the first Pacific play to be written by a woman writer for an all-female cast”22 stages the lives of three young Samoan women working the night shift as cleaners in an office high rise in Auckland. Preceded by the sound of the sisters’ “heavy lethargic breathing” as they scrub the floor, the play’s first line—“God, the toilets stink today!”—underscores the malodorous and chemically toxic conditions of their work producing deodorized atmospheres conducive to settler whiteness (“cleaning until everything’s white”).23 As they work, the sisters contrast the stench of bleach and urine with their memories of Samoa and the “beautiful smelling oils made by our women back in the islands” (6). The youngest sister, Pomu, studies Western science and anthropology and believes that the making of frangipani perfume in the family village in Samoa “must be quite a complex scientific process [involving] all sorts of chemicals” (6). The play concludes with a “cleansing breath,” as the elder sisters tell the youngest how, in Samoa, their mother made frangipani perfume each year when the frangipani tree rained down its blossoms:

By narrating the traditional practice of perfume making, Urale unravels colonial framings of frangipani—a material that Western perfumers (who often market synthetic scents as “frangipani”) have long associated with colonial fantasies of exoticism and “discovery.”24 The scene shifts to a dreamlike reverie as the transmission of this “perfumed secret” instills in Pomu (who left when she was too young to remember in detail) a fully fleshed-out memory of childhood in Samoa:

I see it now . . . another world, colours everywhere. . . . A cool tropical breeze gently sweeps over me and—plucks a million petals free, a shower of white flowers falling and falling like pure rain, a million fragrant kisses on my skin, and I breathe and breathe their secret scent as they brush my cheeks, soft as velvet, soft as a dream. We lie beneath the shelter of the Frangipani Tree and we dream and dream. (35)

Filled with sensuous detail, this scene dramatizes how scent, in connection with other senses, can elicit a flood of multisensory memories—not just a remembered fact or event but “another world.” Even as a sensory memory—a “secret scent” present only in the sisters’ minds, not in their noxious workspace—the scent of frangipani perfume strengthens connections among the sisters, as well as their sense of connection with their human and more-than-human kin in Samoa. Urale’s stage directions emphasize the healing capacities of these scent-based memories: “It is this realm of fantasy, memories and dreams which makes the sisters’ struggle with the stark reality of their lives, bearable” (34, emphasis in original).

On Turtle Island, the smell of sweetgrass is evocative of both cultural continuance and colonialism’s ecological devastation, as well as projects of ecological and cultural resurgence. For the Potawatomi writer and plant scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, the scent of sweetgrass, with its “fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth,” calls forth memories whose very forgetting has been forgotten: “Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”25 These memories include cosmological understandings of the plant as “the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth,”26 as well as the reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships between Indigenous basket-weavers and sweetgrass that evolved over centuries before being interrupted by settler landscapes and the imposition of colonial unknowing.27 Kimmerer details her involvement in a sweetgrass restoration project intended to help reverse ecological, social, and sensory patterns of cultural genocide. Perhaps influenced by Kimmerer’s work, Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) speculative novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) presents the smell of sweetgrass as an epiphanic sensation (“something I thought I’d only ever smelled with the memory of smell”) that awakens hope for the resurgence of Indigenous culture, knowledge, and ecology amid the bleak atmospheres of colonialism and climate apocalypse.28

In these Indigenous-authored texts, olfactory anagnorisis counteracts colonial agnosia on multiple levels: it acknowledges the significance of olfactory knowledge and relations that have been marginalized in Western, settler aesthetics; it draws attention to the processes that have eroded Indigenous people’s access to sensory memories; and it reanimates both individual and collective sensory memories. As a recurrence of ancestral relations that opens onto alternate futures, it resonates with Whyte’s discussion of the Anishinaabe conception of “spiraling time,” which enables Indigenous people to understand themselves “as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously as we walk through life.”29 While these concerns also shape the work of diasporic authors who explore how scent can shape diasporic affect and identity across time and space, it is important to consider that diasporic scents may themselves be uninvited presences in Indigenous smellscapes. The diasporic scents discussed in this book—intergenerational memory traces in Tanaïs’s memoir, the fragrance of sweet ginger in Song of Solomon, the scents of salt fish and durian in Salt Fish Girl—contribute to healing and cultural continuity, but they also introduce migrant scents into colonized Indigenous smellscapes. Although these works all acknowledge the complex, uneven relations between diaspora and Indigenous conquest, they do not fully resolve the ethical questions raised by the relations between introduced “settler atmospherics” and migrant scents.30

Perfume and Karmic Memory

Through their olfactory writing and perfuming, Tanaïs endeavors to make space for memories and affective capacities that have been marginalized by racist, colonial, and patriarchal smellscapes. At the heart of their practice is a conception of scent as a material support (and at times, a traumatic trigger) for memory and affect. Their interest in scent is shaped by an understanding of memory as environmentally distributed: “Memory is fragmentary, fractured in its nature, triggered by everyday sense experiences in the middle of regular life.” The title of their Kirkus Prize–winning memoir, In Sensorium: Notes for My People (2022)—a play on the common memorializing phrase in memoriam—displaces the tendency to privilege textual, inscriptive framings of memory by shifting our attention to embodied memories that are inextricable from sensory inclinations and experiences. The term “notes” blends two different media for holding memories that come together throughout Tanaïs’s work, framing the book not only as a collection of written records but as a set of perfuming components or scent notes. The book’s subtitle—“Notes for My People”—announces another critical shift: the book’s focus is not the supposedly universal, overrepresented sensorium of white, colonial patriarchy but “my people”—a diverse and open-ended collective whose experiences resonate with the author’s own lived experiences of historical, social, and sensory violence and exclusion.

In Sensorium reflects on the development of Tanaïs’s sense of identity as a queer, diasporic, Muslim, Bangladeshi-American femme, as well as how that identity informs their critical approach to perfuming as a practice of beauty, embodied spirituality, relation, and memory work. The book is also oriented by Tanaïs’s exploration of their relationships with family, friends, and lovers, as well as the perfumes they have composed to evoke specific memories and connections. Along the way, Tanaïs interweaves discussions of Atlantic slavery, Partition, the Bangladesh Liberation War, Hindu nationalism, and US race relations that contextualize their own struggles with multiple and intersecting modes of internalized violence—as well as their use of perfuming to support survivors of displacement, domestic and sexual violence, and mass incarceration.

Tanaïs’s book intervenes in a popular perfume writing genre that literary critic Hans Rindisbacher has termed the perfumoirlogue. Rindisbacher describes this as an autobiographical narrative in which the narrator “sets out on a journey to have a personal fragrance made whose ingredients have to do with her own life and are tied to specific geographies. It involves perfumery as an object of personal reflection and a quest that takes the form of a travelogue.”31 This genre—which often frames perfume as a technology for re-accessing exotic smellscapes that authors have visited—reproduces bourgeois conceptions of perfume steeped in exoticism, imperialist nostalgia, and white privilege. Tanaïs blends travel, memory, and scent on very different terms. Contrasting bourgeois travelogues with their own plans (interrupted by Covid) for a trip following the Ganges, Padma, and Megha rivers, they write: “The Great Trip is a well-worn . . . literary canonical tradition that is masculine, Western, wealthy, tilted toward conquest. But I wanted to document this as a Muslim femme—how many of us had written about passages on these waters?”32 Unlike conventional perfumoirlogues, Tanaïs draws on their experiences and embodied memories as a socially marginalized perfumer to develop a critical, historically informed approach to travel and perfuming. For them, perfume is a technology of defense and survival—an atmospheric medium that supports healing from the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, Partition, casteism, and hetero-patriarchal violence.

Memory—both individual and collective—is pivotal to Tanaïs’s reparative perfuming practice. They observe that everyday olfactory encounters catalyze connections across time, even across generations. For diasporic subjects, sensory experiences that awaken memory can be inaccessible, involuntary, or traumatic; but catalyzing sensory memories can also reanimate—and perhaps repair—fractured connections to past experience. Tanaïs approaches perfuming as a practice of empowerment that claims some measure of atmospheric agency. They write: “By collecting fragrant materials, what Saidiya Hartman calls degraded material of the archive, and transforming them into new compositions, I have found a way to wrest back our memories, bodies, stories, and smells from the hard damage of colonization” (10). Referencing Hartman’s groundbreaking work on “critical fabulation” as a response to the violent erasures of the archive,33 Tanaïs frames perfuming as a tool for decolonizing memory—with memory understood not as a purely cognitive process but as a capacity that takes material form in everyday smellscapes. Tanaïs shifts the scene of memory work from official state archives to the air itself as a material archive where everyday, transient, and episodic encounters with memory are—or might yet be—accessible to all.

In addition to black feminist writers like Hartman and Toni Morrison, Tanaïs draws on the Vedantic, Hindu, and Buddhist concept of Vāsanā to articulate how scents can either enable or withhold capacities for embodied memory. In these philosophical traditions, vasana—a term derived from the Sanskrit vas, “to perfume,”34 and that also can refer to the perfuming technique of effleurage—is an intergenerational tendency or inclination, a residue of past desires. Wendy Doniger, a lifelong scholar of Hinduism and one of Tanaïs’s sources on vasanas, glosses the term as follows: “We remember something that we cannot remember, from a lost past, through the power of the invisible tracks or traces left behind on our souls by those events; these traces the Hindus call vasanas, ‘perfumes,’ scents that are the impressions of anything remaining unconsciously in the mind—the present consciousness of past perceptions.”35 Adapting this concept as a central element of their perfuming practice, Tanaïs writes, “Vasana is a karmic memory, traces of a former life carried into the next; an imprint of a person or a place you once knew. These are the perfumes we know from other lifetimes, in the Hindu tradition of a cosmic déjà vu, a scent that we’ve encountered before” (21). Materially dispersed across everyday landscapes, olfactory memories are not just personal for Tanaïs—they have a powerful intergenerational basis.

Tanaïs significantly departs from spiritual traditions that stigmatize vasana as both a sign and incitement of desire. In the words of the Hindu spiritual leader Swami Chinmayananda, for example, vasanas are figured as “iron chains shackling the feet, for him who wishes to be liberated from the prison house of this world.”36 Such calls to “eradicate” vasanas align not only with bourgeois, racist, and patriarchal imperatives to eradicate unwanted odors but, more broadly, with discourses of responsibilization that displace social forces—such as the historically sedimented outcomes of empire, patriarchy, casteism, colonization, slavery, and incarceration (note the chains and prison house)—onto individual behaviors. Refusing to participate in the heteropatriarchal and colonial suppression of bodily truths, Tanaïs instead welcomes vasanas as lively, molecular traces of fragmented memories, kinships, and desires. In addition to orienting their practice as a perfumer, these karmic memory-traces provide an organizing through line for Tanaïs’s book: “Laced throughout this text are vasanas that live in my body, my own, those of my family, those of my people. . . . When we know a person’s body, as we inhale them, our mind forms a memory, a vasana of their scent into our own body. Their molecules imprinted into our minds” (21–22). In this reformulation, vasanas are not just psychological imprints of individual desires but incitements to expand the temporal and social scope of relationality. They do not simply reference the past, but also—through what Will Tullett terms smell’s “polysynchronous temporalities”—extend past lifetimes into the breather’s present and possible future relationships.37

The vasanas explored in In Sensorium are not for universal consumption. The book’s subtitle indicates that these memory-steeped scents are intended for “my people”—those who share some aspects of Tanaïs’s experience as a queer Muslim femme, a postcolonial diasporic survivor of sexual violence and intergenerational traumas stemming from British colonialism and the genocidal violence of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. When a critic dismisses one of their perfumes, Mala, by complaining that “This smells more like a place, than a perfume,” Tanaïs explains that this was precisely the point: “I made that perfume as a brown-skinned woman in a brown-skinned land, and I wanted to hold the city close to me. For some of us, language, trauma, labor, and land cannot be extricated from why we perfume” (146, emphasis in original). Rather than appealing to the white, bourgeois, and exoticizing preferences that stand in for “universal” tastes, Tanaïs seeks to create scents that surface obstructed and historically derecognized memories—including their own past experiences as a survivor of sexual violence, intergenerational trauma, and ongoing racism and Islamophobia.

Later in the book, Tanaïs provides a more detailed account of this perfume’s origins:

When I returned to New York [from New Delhi], I missed my old haunts and scents of the little Gold Leaf cigarettes I smoked, tea, spices, garlands of rose, carnation, and marigold dangling from the wedding shops, so I re-created that place in this perfume, Mala, as in a garland of flowers, beads, and stories, and in Spanish: a bad woman. I use a single drop of scent of a loose woman—choya nakh oil—to fix the perfume so that it lingers. Drops of turmeric are in the heart of this perfume, not enough to discern its smell. This is a secret vasana, embedded in this incense, the remnants of flowers and memories made to burn. Reborn as fragrant smoke. (271, emphasis in original)

Mala does not commodify or exoticize New Delhi’s scents for universal consumption; nor does it present the “scent of a loose woman” (choya nakh—a note that Tanaïs elsewhere traces to erotic texts that offer privileged “men’s perspectives on their lovers as sex objects, aphrodisiacs, escapes”) simply as a means of objectifying women (63). Instead, Mala is designed to communicate a situated experience: the embodied memories of “a brown-skinned woman in a brown-skinned land.” Smellscape, here, is tied to Tanaïs’s encounters with the vasanas of New Delhi. For example, their erotic encounters in the city reframe choya nakh as a note of sexual liberation. And, instead of being either stigmatized as a racialized smell or hyped as a wellness trend appropriated by Western influencers, turmeric is included as a “secret vasana”—an indistinguishable background that holds space for the perfume’s other notes.

In one of the book’s “Perfume Interludes”—short interchapters that reflect on the experiences that gave rise to some of their own perfume compositions—Tanaïs describes Lovers Rock, a perfume inspired by the scent of a former lover. In composing this perfume, they sought to evoke both individual and collective scents, both erotic desire and historical patterns of exploitation:

I wanted to rouse the way I once craved the spiced incense of his body, the frankincense and myrrh oil hustled on sidewalks from Harlem to Bed Stuy. The perfume evokes sex—a heart of Sri Lankan spices, an after-hours dry-down, the sweet smell of sex juice, as you lay next to a person you want to devour, edible gourmand notes of vanilla, an oil that is deep dark, viscous, and black, with none of the associations with white childhood innocence, for the laborers who hand-pollinate the world’s vanilla are youths in Madagascar. . . . Lovers Rock is a composition that tells the story of conquest. Its notes are remnants of the past, forgotten jars in the pantry, a reminder of how the spice and slave trade stole the lives and labor of Black and brown people across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. (163)

Tanaïs frames the perfume’s composition as a critique of the cultural whitewashing that associates gourmand fragrances like vanilla with whiteness, innocence, and nostalgia—“concepts of racial innocence in white childhood that are oblivious to or repel and erase the experience of others.”38 As a composition that brings together histories of conquest, enslavement, and desire, Lovers Rock evokes the socially and affectively generative force of erotic connection in the wake of racial capitalist exploitation and erasure. Yet the scents that call forth these collective stories of conquest, resilience, and black and brown love are not freely available in metropolitan smellscapes: “Ironically, all of the notes are restricted or banned by European fragrance regulations; the tobacco, clove, black pepper, tonka bean are all allergens” (163). Like mustard oil, these scents—and the migrant memories they might catalyze—are regulated in the name of “public” health. Should access to distributed memory also be seen as a health determinant, especially for people displaced by colonialism, war, and economic and environmental exploitation?

Tanaïs’s understanding of perfume as a technology of healing emerges from their work with survivors of sexual violence, genocide, and incarceration: “I have documented and recorded the stories of survivors around the world, realizing that when people recall their trauma, scent is inextricable from the story” (279). While these scents can trigger trauma, Tanaïs suggests that perfume can also move survivors past traumatic patterns of repetition and disassociation. They conceive of survival in sensory terms: “To survive is to slowly recollect your senses, after having been estranged from your body” (280). Sensory memories shape their method for creating perfumes tailored to the stories of survivors:

When I have created perfumes with survivors of domestic violence and incarceration, we discuss the vasanas of their life before and after their experiences of violence. Each fragrance is a composition of the scent memories amassed throughout their lifetime, notes from their childhood, of solace, of yearning. Only a thin boundary separates the scents of trauma and pleasure. When we work together to build a fragrance, I ask them to think of this act as a metaphor for their freedom. Once you release a scent trapped inside a vessel onto your skin, into the air, I tell them, you are no longer the only one who has to hold this pain. (244, emphasis in original)

Here, Tanaïs describes a perfuming practice that refuses commodification: instead of appealing to a mass audience or to a supposedly universal sensorium, each of these perfumes addresses an individual survivor. Perfume does not offer an escape here—only a means of releasing traumatic vasanas into the air, beyond the confines of the survivor’s body and mind.

Tanaïs’s podcast, MALA: Blooms and Bad Women (2018–20), offers a closer look at their practice of reparative perfuming. In this project, Tanaïs holds space for five formerly incarcerated women to “retell their stories of survival & reimagine them as scents.”39 Drawing on interviews in which they asked about the women’s olfactory memories, Tanaïs creates perfumes intended to support the healing of black women whose sensory experience has been neutralized by years spent in alternately deodorized and malodorous carceral spaces. The interviews bear witness to how carceral smellscapes deploy a range of tactics—deodorization, body odors, chemical cleaning agents, and stale air—as tools of abjection and control. One of Tanaïs’s interlocutors, Claude, spent twenty-five years in prison for a crime she did not commit. She now wears a range of perfumes—including some inherited from her mother, a Voudun practitioner who created her own perfumes. Drawing on Claude’s memories, Tanaïs creates a perfume that is “bright and tropical, inspired by her youth, her Haitian heritage, a perfume as a getaway . . . The top sparkles with juicy citrus notes of white and pink grapefruit and bergamot—an homage to her father’s cologne. For the heart, I go full on tropics: gardenia core and fatty coconut milk. And the base is an amber musk reminiscent of sacred incense, Vodou, and her mother, where Claude’s life began.”40 This perfume is not an escape from Claude’s reality, but a gathering of her scent-based memories and heritage: her father’s cologne, the Haitian tropics, an evocation of her mother’s Vodou incense. Because they evoke connections across a range of Claude’s place-based memories and transgenerational ties, the perfume may help reanimate memories of childhood interrupted by Claude’s twenty-five-year incarceration, which began at the age of nineteen. Tanaïs deploys olfaction’s powerful connections across space and time—its evocation of other places, other times, family inheritance, and the cross-generational circum-Atlantic connections held in Voudun—to reintegrate memories and inheritances that have been unsettled by the prison’s fracturing of time, place, community, and sensory experience.

Through displacement, settler ecologies, legal regulation, olfactory stigmas, and the norm of deodorization, racial and colonial capitalism produce uneven smellscapes that unmoor Indigenous, migrant, and other vulnerable subjects from embodied memories. In narratives by the Indigenous authors Johnson, Urale, Kimmerer, and Dimaline, the literary trope of olfactory anagnorisis stages not only the recovery of individual memories but a reawakening of sensory knowledges and modes of relation that have been disrupted by colonial agnosia. Tanaïs experiments with olfactory writing and perfuming as practices that can support the varied migrant and marginalized communities she calls “my people” in remaking deodorized, noxious, and culturally exclusionary smellscapes. These works provide a model for critical studies of smellscape—not as a framework for studying and optimizing the sensory experience of a supposedly “universal” breather, but as a site of struggle over access to sensory atmospheres, cultural continuance, and public memory.

Notes

1. 1. J. Douglas Porteous, “Smellscape,” Progress in Physical Geography 9, no. 3 (September 1985): 360. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

2. 2. Jieling Xiao et al., “Recent Advances in Smellscape Research for the Built Environment,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (July 2021), https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.700514/full.

3. 3. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2002); Anuradha Gobin, “Constructing a Picturesque Landscape: Picturing Sugar Plantations in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies,” Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas 4, no. 1 (2011): 42–66.

4. 4. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983; repr. Columbia University Press, 2014).

5. 5. Edwin Hutchins, “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds,” Cognitive Science 19, no. 3 (1995): 284.

6. 6. Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time (Polity, 2017), 57.

7. 7. Han, The Scent of Time, 57, 46.

8. 8. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrief (Random House, 1934), 57–58.

9. 9. Larry Shiner, Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), 133, emphasis in original.

10. 10. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (Mariner, 2004), 1.

11. 11. Linda Ziedrich, The Joy of Pickling (Harvard Common Press, 2009), 154.

12. 12. On the stigmatization of racialized immigrants’ everyday food smells, see Lalaie Ameeriar, “The Sanitized Sensorium,” American Anthropologist 114, no. 3 (2012): 509–20.

13. 13. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (Macmillan, 1922), 41.

14. 14. Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “Introduction.”

15. 15. Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein, “Introduction.” The authors cite Jodi Byrd’s unpublished work, “Fracturing Futurity, Colonial Agnosia, and the Untimely Indigenous Present,” lecture presented at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, October 25, 2012.

16. 16. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12–19.

17. 17. Christy Spackman, The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (University of California Press, 2023), 14.

18. 18. Lee Maracle, Celia’s Song (Cormorant, 2014), 58. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

19. 19. Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action,” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 602.

20. 20. E. Pauline Johnson, “As It Was in the Beginning,” in The Moccasin Maker (William Briggs, 1913), 167–68.

21. 21. Johnson, “As It Was in the Beginning,” 172.

22. 22. David O’Donnell, “Introduction,” in Frangipani Perfume by Makerita Urale/Mapaki by Dianna Fuemana (The Play Press, 2004), i.

23. 23. Makerita Urale, Frangipani Perfume, in Frangipani Perfume by Makerita Urale/Mapaki by Dianna Fuemana, 4, 7. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

24. 24. See Andrew Kettler, “Making the Synthetic Epic: Septimus Piesse, the Manufacturing of Mercutio Frangipani, and Olfactory Renaissance in Victorian England,” Senses and Society 10, no. 1 (2015): 5–25.

25. 25. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013), ix.

26. 26. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, ix.

27. 27. For detailed discussions of Kimmerer’s work, see Hsu, Smell of Risk,, chapter 5, and Warren Cariou, “Sweetgrass Stories: Listening for Animate Land,” Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 3 (September 2018): 338–52.

28. 28. Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (DCB, 2017), 168.

29. 29. Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crisis,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (2018): 229.

30. 30. Kristen Simmons (Southern Paiute), “Settler Atmospherics,” Fieldsights (November 20, 2017), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics, accessed December 18, 2024.

31. 31. Hans Rindisbacher, “What’s This Smell? Shifting Worlds of Olfactory Perception,” KulturPoetik 15, no. 1 (2015): 89.

32. 32. Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People (Harper, 2022), 299. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

33. 33. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 11.

34. 34. Martha McClintock et al., “Pheromones and Vasanas: The Functions of Social Chemosignals,” in Evolutionary Psychology and Motivation, 75–112 (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 99. McClintock et al. adapt the term vasanas to refer to chemosignals that are not consciously recognized as odors: “those unconscious chemosignals whose functional effects are related to or predicted by their odour qualities when they are experienced consciously” (99).

35. 35. Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 108.

36. 36. Swami Chinmayanda, Vedanta: The Science of Life, compiled by K. V. K. Thampuran (Central Chinmaya Mission Trust, 1980), 2:484.

37. 37. Will Tullett, Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2023), 88.

38. 38. R. Claire Bunschoten, “‘Eau de cookie dough’: Gourmand Fragrances, Negotiating Nostalgia, and Inedible Food Cultures,” Food and Foodways 32, no. 4 (September 2024): 333.

39. 39. Tanaïs (Tanwi Nandini Islam), MALA Episode 1: Sharon (March 8, 2018), https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/mala-blooms-bad/mala-episode-1-sharon-Jv8mu-oXyQ2/?srsltid=AfmBOoqnHOJidPiIZ05icNxPtmpkYQrPfOi8s32Ayax44HOoIr6bP8Fe.

40. 40. Tanaïs (Tanwi Nandini Islam), MALA Episode 5: Claude (April 5, 2018), https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/mala-blooms-bad/mala-episode-5-claude-QD1HVkUSxRo/.