Andrew Kettler, "The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

New Books in African American Studies · Jul 27, 2020 · 53m

In his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world. Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embodied cultural knowledge and racial othering that the very European biological function of smell…