Olfactory Worldmaking

by Hsuan L. Hsu

134 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2026

Reviews

[gael · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes, utterly excellent. has me curious about the sensory world i am building for myself and imagining what our cities might’ve smelled like before intentional planting campaigns, before the deodorization of public spaces, and the food i craft. i’m walking down the street writing this struck by the idea of humans as wetware that intelligence is yet to center and understand, carefully smelling the dog shit and petroleum and neighbors’ perfume as a new sculpture of the world building of the here and now.

[Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a perfume lover, I picked up this book to better understand olfactory experiences. I have come to not only be more keenly aware of my own sense of smell, but also understand it as a tool to transform our reality and build connections across time and space. Dr. Hsuan Hsu examines various mediums from art to perfumes to speculative fiction, and how scent can help us both imagine and create a more equitable world.

Stigmatized scents hold the power to evoke repressed memories on “personal and collective, transgenerational scales” for Indigenous and diasporic communities (p. 19). I found it particularly interesting that Hsu touched on relations between Indigenous and migrant populations.

“...diasporic olfactory practices can contribute to the transformation of Indigenous smellscapes (and, here, to the problematic rhetorical indigenization of diasporic scents).” (p. 70)

“While Lai explores how scent can invoke intergenerational connections with past violence and complicity – for example, one dreaming patient ‘could recall every death, every rape, every wound, every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of ancestral lineage’ (85) – even this expansive framing does not account for the position of
diasporic settlers who benefit from settler colonialism even when their ancestors did not directly commit such violence, and even when their ancestors suffered historical violence in other places.” (p. 103)

“How can we draw on – and redistribute – the worldmaking capacities of smell while also supporting efforts to decolonize smellscapes?” (p. 103)

I enjoy trying out new fragrances, but I’ve found that some recently released perfumes have Orientalist, exoticizing descriptions. Hsu mentions the memoir, In Sensorium: Notes for my People, where TanaÏs reflects on their “identity as a queer, diasporic, Muslim,
Bangladeshi-American femme as well as how that identity informs their critical approach to perfumery…”

While memory is integral for TanaÏs’ perspective, commercialized perfume houses use Orientalist descriptions to appeal to mass audiences, whose “universal” tastes likely reflect white, bourgeois, exoticizing preferences. TanaÏs seeks to create for “my people.” They recognize their fragrances are not for universal consumption and that allows them to
communicate their experience and memories to heal other queer, brown, Muslim, diasporic individuals.

Though this was a difficult read at some points (mostly at the beginning), as someone who was not familiar with academic conversations surrounding olfaction, I thought this was a great introduction to the subject.

[Fizzah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would love to put the ideas in this book into conversation with Donna Harraway's idea of the post-human and the human as cyborg. Hsu describes scent as a "technique for becoming atmospheric" (59), in other words, of escaping our individualistic, corporeal realities.

This book offers a new way of conceptualizing a sense I had previously confronted through the mediation of capitalism. Hsu envisions scent as an avenue for reconnecting with our communities and environments—past and present, human and non-human—and simulating alternate realities. While playing with manufactured scents has already taught me how perfume can create a plane for imagination, fantasy, and escape, I had not thought about how this can take place outside of our hegemonic realities and even challenge them.

Going forward, I hope to be mindful of how scents are involved in "worldmaking." Here are some small ways that I hope to change the way I engage with scent:

- becoming more tolerant of "malodor" and questioning if my sense of disgust is rooted in prejudice; after all, humans are "wetware" (Jones qtd. 108)
- challenging the deodorization of spaces, but also protecting myself and others from scents generated by harmful processes
- indulging in cultural scents that are deemed taboo by the dominant culture
- being conscious of how scent can signal identity—"a marker of class, femininity, sexuality, animality, impropriety, and racialized contagion" (92)
- taking back fragrance notes that are part of Orientalist projects
- appreciating scents tied to my background even if they are not mass-appealing—for example, in Salt Fish Girl, Miranda describes the "cat-piss-and-pepper odour" of her childhood as "heavenly" and oddly comforting (Lai qtd. 99); orienting towards scents that are part of the flora and fauna of my home

[samiha · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was really fundamental in helping me with developing my ideas for my dissertation project. it was useful for understanding how we engage through the world through the senses & what sociocultural impacts influence that, although i think at times it could have been pushed further or explained more clearly.