Hsuan L. Hsu, a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, spoke with Rob Hopkins about whether the sense of smell can help people fall in love with the future. The starting point is the idea that if we envision cities with clean air, urban agriculture, more bicycles and happier people, then immersive experiences using smells — perhaps alongside sounds — could allow us to experience that scenario.
Hsu notes that there is already considerable work on dystopian uses of smell: exposing privileged residents of the Global North to the olfactory by-products of their lifestyles. Such an experience can jolt people out of their habits. But the more interesting question, he says, is how we engage with smell in more reparative ways. He mentions an example he considers a failure: an electric car company commissioned someone to create the “smell of the future” for an advertisement, but, as Will Tullett writes in his book Smell and the Past, mass-producing the fragrance required creating a great deal of toxicity — without resolving the environmental issues associated with electric transport.
In literature, Hsu finds ideas for a society more attuned to smell. In Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, the alien Oankali communicate through touch and chemosensation, meaning smells and pheromones, and this raises questions about free will, desire, coercion and kinship. In Fledgling, also by Butler, humans are compulsively attracted to vampires' smells. Even if these works do not seem directly environmental, they show a future in which smell is a fundamental means of intimacy and communication, from which the modern Western world has largely become disconnected.
Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2003) offers a more directly environmental version. In a future of genetic modification, the heroine smells of durian, a Southeast Asian fruit with a very strong odour that is banned in many public spaces. She is stigmatised for this, but is attracted to another heroine who smells of salted fish. According to Hsu, the novel does not simply say that genetic modification is bad and that we should return to pure nature; it shows that corporate genetic engineering is exploitative and destructive, but cannot fully control its outcomes, opening up unexpected queer and cross-species possibilities for reproduction. Smell is an integral part of this vision.
Hsu explains why smell has such power: the olfactory receptor is the one most directly exposed to the world and is connected straight to the limbic system, the seat of memory, desire and instinctive responses. This is why we react physically rather than in a fully calculated way. In Western culture, he adds, smell was downgraded as an animalistic, racialised and gendered sense because it was considered a threat to rationality. Deodorising spaces is connected to the fantasy that humans are separate from the world.
Hsu cautions that there is no single smell of the future, while Hopkins observes that there is no single smell of the present either: every place smells different. Hsu notes that olfactory preferences are connected to history, memory and cultural access. Personal scent dispensers on mobile phones, he says, would probably worsen problems such as screen time and energy consumption. Smells considered “normal” in American suburbs or cities may not connect with everyone's childhood memories, and this is not simply a matter of preference but of access to history and memory.
The relationship between Indigenous cultures and smell is particularly significant. Hsu refers to Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass: the smell of sweetgrass invites people into reciprocal relationships with the world and local ecology, creating kinships beyond the human species. Smell thus also serves as a means of communication across species.
The “olfactory justice” Hsu proposes has two aspects. The first concerns exposure to risk: air pollution, toxins and bad smells are systematically redistributed to the most vulnerable and poorest communities. The aim is to end these patterns and expose everyone to the smells we produce in order to live as we do. The second concerns access to culturally meaningful smells that allow a connection with collective memory, as well as restoring smellscapes destroyed by ecological colonialism. He acknowledges that it remains an open question how migrants and refugees can access such smells without contributing to further displacement of Indigenous smellscapes.
As an example of experiential design, he cites Anicka Yi's exhibition In Love with the World at Tate Modern. The artist researched how the site smelled over time — thousands of years ago and during industrialisation. This is not a return to some idealised past, but an acknowledgement of a place's different olfactory layers: for example, in Sacramento, the smell of the river and vegetation once coexisted with Japantown before it was razed, while today a more uniformly corporate smell from cafés, shops and cars prevails. In the same exhibition, artificial jellyfish-like creatures sensed the space and visitors mainly through heat — and possibly through smell — raising the question of whether an artificial intelligence trained on embodied senses would develop different capacities for relationships, emotion and coexistence with humans.
In closing, Hsu insists that connecting with the future requires a deep and complex connection with the past — not with a single narrative, but with multiple, conflicting histories, especially suppressed ones. He refers to agnotology, the study of how gaps in knowledge are culturally produced. Smell, he says, can enter these gaps, make them tangible and reconnect us with them, opening up different ideas about the future.
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