Race, nose, truth: dystopian odours of the Other in American antebellum consciousness

Abstract

ABSTRACT It was in 1835, in the wake of the Nullification Crisis that shook the United States with the threat of civil war over federal law, state’s rights and the Slave Power, that Jerome Holgate, under the pseudonym ‘Oliver Bolokitten’, published his dystopian fiction A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation. It posited the existence of an African body smell that would make anti-odour machines essential if American societies fell prey to the potential ravages of racial miscegenation. Two decades after Holgate offered his dystopian world-view of smell and race, ‘Cephas Broadluck’, a pseudonym for the American author Allen Gazlay, published Races of Mankind: With Travels in Grubland (1856), an allegorical attack on comparable forms of sensory and sexual ‘amalgamation’, also proposing olfactory detection as a racial protection for the white body politic. The antebellum era dystopias of Holgate and Gazlay combined ideas of truth and race through the sensory experiences of the nose, which had previously been socially conditioned to sense racial Others through a false consciousness about the smell of Africans throughout the Atlantic World. Despite the efforts of academics to deconstruct such absurd beliefs and experiences in the modern world, olfactory racism continues in the languages of both current political leaders and within the bowels of the Internet. Because these prejudicial perceptions continue through what seems for many racists to be biological experiences of truth, scholars must focus much more on analysing embodied perceptions of Othering if academic arguments about the social construction of race are to make any inroads against the return of racist, technologized and fascist modernity in the contemporary West.