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.

摘要

1835 年，在废奴化危机（Nullification Crisis）之后，内战威胁着联邦法律、州权和奴隶制，震动了美国，杰罗姆·霍尔盖特（Jerome Holgate）以笔名“奥利弗·波洛基滕”（Oliver Bolokitten）出版了他的反乌托邦小说在合并之城逗留。它假设如果美国社会成为种族混杂的潜在破坏的牺牲品，非洲体味的存在将使防臭机器变得必不可少。在霍尔盖特提出他对气味和种族的反乌托邦世界观的二十年后，美国作家艾伦·加兹雷的笔名“塞法斯·布罗德勒克”出版了《人类种族：格鲁布兰旅行记》（1856），对类似形式的感官和性“融合”的寓言式攻击，还提出嗅觉检测作为对白人政治的种族保护。Holgate 和 Gazlay 的战前反乌托邦通过鼻子的感官体验将真理和种族的观念结合在一起，而鼻子的感官体验以前在社会上已经习惯于通过对整个大西洋世界非洲人气味的错误意识来感知种族他人。尽管学术界努力解构现代世界中这种荒谬的信仰和经历，但嗅觉种族主义仍在当前政治领导人的语言中和互联网内部继续存在。因为这些偏见在许多种族主义者看来是对真理的生物学体验继续存在，