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6 - The Politics of Smell

from Part Three - A Whiff of Alterity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2023

Xuelei Huang
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

The Communist revolution from the 1950s to the 1970s unleashed an excess of olfactory anomalies. In the lexicon of Mao-era politics, class enemies are ‘dog shit’ and labour camps are ‘cowsheds’. A method to castigate landowners and capitalists is to ‘stinken’ (douchou) them, and the bourgeois ‘fragrant breeze’ has to be perceived as stinking air. Chapter 6 measures the mighty symbolic power commanded by the olfactory in the moral–political regime of Maoist China, and ponders its jarring relationship with the teleology of Western olfactory modernity. Adopting the keywords approach initiated by Raymond Williams, I analyse a number of smell-related keywords that pervade Mao Zedong’s writings, party documents, and official media. Bridging the biological and the social, this olfactory glossary maps the emotional states of paranoia, rudeness, ruthlessness, and love–hate, all necessary ingredients of the Communist revolution. Overall, Mao’s olfactory revolution was yet another round of retuning the neurons, and yet smell never fails in laughing at the absurdity of human acts evidenced by the contradictions embedded in the propaganda discourse.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scents of China
A Modern History of Smell
, pp. 219 - 244
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • The Politics of Smell
  • Xuelei Huang, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Scents of China
  • Online publication: 20 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009207065.010
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  • The Politics of Smell
  • Xuelei Huang, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Scents of China
  • Online publication: 20 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009207065.010
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Politics of Smell
  • Xuelei Huang, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Scents of China
  • Online publication: 20 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009207065.010
Available formats
×