Some words recently culled from the book "Smell of Risk" by Huan Hsu. Chosen to remind us how scent really can be a powerful player in society, race and politics on a global scale.
Atmo-orientalism – “A discourse that organizes political and cultural power by tethering olfactory perception to racial difference.” – Neologism and description by Huan Hsu
Sentence: Atmo-orientalism does the work of racialization on two level: as a discourse and as a strategy for producing space. – Huan Hsu, “Smell of Risk”.
Dialectical Odour - A complex smell that dramatizes the frictions between two ideologically opposed atmospheres. – Huan Hsu describing a word in his book “Smell of Risk” first used by Jim Drobnick’s essay “Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spaciality.”
Sentence: In Rev. Al Sharpton’s eulogy for Duante Wright the police become the dialectical-odor of the scent of justice: a red flag of danger in the air if ever there was one.
Hypo-osmic – The opposite of hyperosmic, where smell is denied any time or space and a character/person hardly notices or thinks about smells to which they are continually exposed too. Huan Hsu coined this term when considering hyperosmic characteristics of detection and crime.
Sentence: The author wrote generously about the characters feelings, and beautifully crafted the context and scenery though the character remained hypo-osmic where scent was continually ignored.