Smith, Mark M. (Advisor)
Kettler, Andrew (Author)
Smith, Mark M.
University of South Carolina
Physical Details: 587
Language: English
This dissertation analyzes discourses concerning odor within the Atlantic World from approximately 1492 until 1838. Numerous historians and philosophers have described how the Reformation’s emphasis on texts and an increased concentration on visual science during the Enlightenment influenced Western Europeans to heighten the importance of the eye to the detriment of the lower sense of smell. This dissertation begins by thinking about materialist contours of this olfactory decline through a linguistic analysis of sulfur within seventeenth century England. It then proceeds to examine how in the early Americas such a repudiation of the sense of smell did not occur. The nearness to indigenous sensory aesthetics, and the subaltern’s use of odor within religious rituals, kept specific European colonists, Africans, and Native Americans vitally in tune with their noses. This retention of olfactory sensibilities is exemplified through the conversion methods of Jesuit Fathers in New France and the scientific observations of Anglo-American botanists in North America. To control this continued use of odor in the Americas that was often used to mark sameness and difference, European writers rhetorically linked the lower classes, women, and other races to powerful scents. The construction of blackness specifically included the use of odor to stain African bodies as pungent compared to rhetoric that asserted whiteness as unpolluted. In the Old World, olfactory decline was an essential aspect of nation building and ethnic border control processes during the Early Modern Era, while in the Atlantic World the exchange of new bodies and novel commodities made the transgressive threat of odor irrepressible.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Jonathan Reinarz;
(2014)
Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell
(/isis/citation/CBB025338985/)
Book
Short, John Rennie;
(2009)
Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World
(/isis/citation/CBB001022546/)
Book
Mark M. Smith;
(2006)
How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses
(/isis/citation/CBB492390149/)
Thesis
Jerusha Westbury;
(2016)
Marvelous and Monstrous: The Thorny Problem of Control in Atlantic Colonial Botany
(/isis/citation/CBB090733357/)
Article
Smith, Roger;
(2011)
“The Sixth Sense”: Towards a History of Muscular Sensation
(/isis/citation/CBB001250366/)
Article
Barbieri, Patrizio;
(2004)
The Speaking Trumpet: Developments of Della Porta's “Ear Spectacles” (1589--1967)
(/isis/citation/CBB001023816/)
Multimedia Object
Lance C. Thurner;
Bigelow, Allison Margaret;
(2020)
Allison Bigelow, “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World” (UNC Press 2020)
(/isis/citation/CBB595307728/)
Article
Christine Folch;
(2021)
Ceremony, Medicine, Caffeinated Tea: Unearthing the Forgotten Faces of the North American Stimulant Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria)
(/isis/citation/CBB450129077/)
Book
Alexander, Denis R.;
Numbers, Ronald L.;
(2010)
Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins
(/isis/citation/CBB001020054/)
Article
Smithers, Gregory D.;
(2015)
Beyond the “Ecological Indian”: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America
(/isis/citation/CBB001422283/)
Article
Ned Weidner;
(2017)
Rotting Fish in Paradise: Putrefaction, Ecophobia, and Olfactory Imaginations of Southern California
(/isis/citation/CBB687778607/)
Article
Christy Spackman;
(June 2020)
In smell’s shadow: Materials and politics at the edge of perception
(/isis/citation/CBB826002581/)
Book
Katelynn Robinson;
(2019)
The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages: A Source of Certainty
(/isis/citation/CBB133743847/)
Article
Hoffmann, Beata;
(2013)
Scent in Science and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001213727/)
Book
Allyson C. DeMaagd;
(2022)
Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB332040827/)
Article
Emily Stark;
Jeremy Pitt;
Alfian Nur Wicaksono;
Kristina Milanovic;
Victoria Lush;
Stephen Hoover;
(December 2018)
Odorveillance and the Ethics of Robotic Olfaction
(/isis/citation/CBB143810266/)
Chapter
Baert, Barbara;
(2013)
“An Odour. A Taste. A Touch. Impossible To Describe”: Noli me tangere and the Senses
(/isis/citation/CBB001201648/)
Article
Read, Sophie;
(2013)
Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent
(/isis/citation/CBB001200525/)
Article
Jenner, Mark S. R.;
(2011)
Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories
(/isis/citation/CBB001212188/)
Chapter
()
The Psychophysics of Taste and Smell: From Experimental Science to Commercial Tool
(/isis/citation/CBB886836207/)
Be the first to comment!