6 - The Politics of Smell
from Part Three - A Whiff of Alterity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
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.
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- Scents of ChinaA Modern History of Smell, pp. 219 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023