Sharpening our olfactory gaze

with thermal management in the kitchen at Pu’uhonua o Pu’uhuluhulu, the movement camp established by the Maunakea protectors protesting the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. For Hobart, the centrality of donated coolers as makeshift thermal infrastructures that enabled the sustenance of activists raises challenging questions about the decolonial capacities afforded by cold infrastructures. For example, “What place does refrigeration have within Indigenous futures that move beyond settler capitalism, when coldness has played such an intimate role in these systems of oppression?” (140) Instead of prescribing an idealized version of decolonial “food sovereignty,” Hobart concludes by affirming that, in the face of structural and infrastructural precarity, available infrastructures can be repurposed to serve projects of community care and Indigenous world-making. While the book’s focus is on ice and cold comestibles, Hobart’s theoretical insights will orient research on related topics ranging from air conditioning as an everyday colonial technology to the feedback loops between cooling infrastructures and global climate change, and from diverse pre-colonial understandings of thermal sensation to inquiries into how thermal infrastructures can be redirected toward decolonial ends. Cooling the Tropics offers a compelling model for future research focused on the simultaneously sensorial, biopolitical, and ecological implications of colonialism’s thermal infrastructures.