{"title":"Books by Hsuan L. Hsu","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781479810093","title":"The Smell of Risk","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity's olfactory disparities.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Smell of Risk\u003c\/i\u003e outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity's differentiated atmospheres as a subject worth sniffing out. From the industrial revolution to current-day environmental crises, Hsu uses ecocriticism, geography, and critical race studies to, for example, explore Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists' response to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the devastation settler colonialism has reaped on Indigenous smellscapes. In each instance, Hsu demonstrates the violence that air maintenance, control, and conditioning enacts on the poor and the marginalized. From nineteenth-century miasma theory theory to the synthetic chemicals that pervade twenty-first century air, Hsu takes smell at face value to offer an evocative retelling of urbanization, public health, and environmental violence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301540245877,"sku":"9781479810093","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781479810093_9aa0e7e7-4c99-4814-8152-857bf2bc8397.jpg?v=1786021982"},{"product_id":"9781501377822","title":"Air Conditioning","description":"\u003cp\u003eObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAir conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people’s daily lives, thermoception—or the sensory perception of temperature—is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet air conditioning isn’t for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's \u003ci\u003eAir Conditioning\u003c\/i\u003e explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObject Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301582188917,"sku":"9781501377822","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781501377822_2a46848e-204e-4d49-b7ab-bf27dee5f92a.jpg?v=1786022121"},{"product_id":"olfactory-worldmaking","title":"Olfactory Worldmaking","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eExploring the power of smell to build connections and transform our world\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSmell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilize scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably livable worlds.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRetail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and\/or extended descriptions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484332826997,"sku":"9781517921231","price":9.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781517921231.jpg?v=1786266392"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-hsuan-l-hsu.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}