BUZZ
‘Can manifest through olfactory perception such as comments on ‘smelly’ foods‘
A pair of Concordia University “sensory studies scholars” claim their studies show racism is a “multi-sensory experience” that “transforms the ways in which minorities feel and interact with the world.”
Partners Jayanthan Sriram and Nesli Sriram-Uzundal, whose research “explores perfume and functional scenting as marker of race, class and gender,” and “serves as a form of resistance, critically engaging with and challenging dominant narratives that are damage-centered, oppressive, stereotypical, and often racist” respectively, examine in The Conversation a six-year-old mass shooting in Germany by a “far-right extremist.”
They claim an ignored call for help by one of the victims during the killings (in which all the slain were immigrants) “was not an aberration,” but yet another example of “systemic racism.”
What’s more, the shooter was a “firm believer” in the “Great Replacement” theory who had “scouted” places like shisha bars and kebab joints, some of the involved police had been in chat groups that “shar[ed] right-wing extremist ideologies,” and questions remain about how officials handled certain aspects of the shooting and its aftermath.
“These failures create a reminder of how the racism faced by minorities feeds back into societal structures that can cost lives and obstruct justice,” the authors contend.
Multi-sensory racism can present through a visual categorization based on skin colour — the discomfort of entering predominantly white spaces, for example. It can manifest through olfactory perception such as comments on “smelly” foods.
It affects everyday social interactions like how and where people choose to safely socialize — and why they may prefer to spend their time within their own communities rather than “integrating.”
These experiences culminate in how institutional behaviour sets up or fails to sanction individual racism.
A link in the article to the pair’s research directs to a two-page excerpt of their paper “Between Atmo-Racism and Fragrant Being -The Necropolitics of Guest Work” from the journal Work and Smell.
(Other entries in this journal include “To Deodorize or Not? Literary and Cultural Representations of the Odour of Dried Fish in India,” “Blood Sausage and Violet Perfume – Food Work, Domestic Service, and the Production of a Fragrant Grotesque,” and “The Reek of Decadence of the Modern West – Decadent Orchestrations of Scents.”)
The researchers note a “troubling fallacy” of the mass shooting and “ongoing struggle for recognition of migrants’ experiences in a system where German institutions often treat them as third-class citizens” was referenced by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 book “Between the World and Me”: “Race is the child of racism, not its father.”
Jayanthan’s School of Graduate Studies page prominently features the question “What is the role of perfumes in the creation and discrimination of identities and how is their creation connected to a novel relation between aesthetics and ethics?”
The bottom of the page contains a “territorial acknowledgement” (pictured).
Nesli discusses her “emotional journey across borders and identities” in a “Resisting Colonization” podcast from last September.
MORE: Penn disability studies course to ‘fuse’ visuality studies, queer, Black feminist and film theory
