Hsuan L. Hsu (University of California, Davis, USA)

May 14, 2019
10 a.m.-12 noon, Philosophicum I, P 109a

This talk will consider how racial and geographical disparities inflect dystopian representations of environmental risk. Drawing from literary and performative stagings of atmospheric violence—including smog, factory fumes, industrial accidents, and stink bombs—it will consider how we might rethink the “Anthropocene” (perhaps better termed the racial, colonial Capitalocene) in connection with transnational and settler patterns of “air conditioning” or atmospheric manipulation.

Hsuan L. Hsu is Professor of English at UC Davis. He earned his A.B. in Literature from Harvard University in 1998 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from U.C. Berkeley in 2004. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His interests include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010) and Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015). He is working on a manuscript entitled The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (under contract with NYU Press), which considers olfactory aesthetics as a mode of engaging with environmental injustice in literature, art, memoir, and law.

You can download the poster for the event here.

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