Smell as method: Hsuan L. Hsu’s Olfactory Worldmaking and multimodal environmental humanities

Abstract

Abstract

This review examines Olfactory Worldmaking (2026) by Hsuan L. Hsu as a pivotal intervention in the environmental humanities, reconceptualizing olfaction as a medium of relational and reparative worldmaking. Building on but reorienting The Smell of Risk (2020), Hsu moves beyond modern regimes that equate odor with toxicity and contamination to theorize smell as transcorporeal, affective, and atmospheric, enabling humans and more-than-human environments to co-constitute worlds. Published in the wake of COVID-19, when widespread anosmia rendered smell perceptible through absence, the book frames olfactory deprivation as a structural feature of modern deodorized spaces rather than an anomaly, highlighting contemporary environmental estrangement and sensory normalization. Across chapters on smellscapes, Black diasporic “microclimates,” and speculative aesthetic practices, Hsu shows how olfactory experience functions as a multimodal site of ethical and political imagination. Smell activates distributed memory, sustains life within racialized atmospheres, and facilitates alternative modes of sensing that challenge anthropocentric perception. Drawing on cross-disciplinary scholarship, Hsu advances an atmospheric ethics grounded in opacity and “solidarity in incommensurability,” emphasizing participatory, embodied engagement. While the book’s breadth is a major strength, the reviewer suggests it could benefit from more sustained engagement with specific case studies and further theorization of non-Western sensory epistemologies, offering fruitful avenues for future research.