Atmo-Orientalism

Abstract

Drawing on travelogues, legal documents, public health reports, descriptions of Chinatowns, Yellow Peril fiction, and racial iconography, this chapter traces a long-standing mode of racial discourse that has framed Asiatic bodies and practices as embodiments of modernity’s noxious atmospheres. It then considers how the early twentieth-century author Edith Maude Eaton / Sui Sin Far and the contemporary conceptual artist Anicka Yi deploy scent to critique and redress this pattern of olfactory racialization.