A virtual Fellow's Forum with Andrew Kettler, Ph.D. from July 2021. Recording available.
In The Smell of Slavery historian Andrew Kettler argues that during the Early Modern Era, Blackness and whiteness were increasingly defined by a cultural binary that identified whiteness with purity and Blackness with inherent sinfulness and odor. The shifting of odor upon the racialized “other” is a time-worn tradition that was expanded in the Atlantic World to justify the enslavement and exploitation of African bodies, and to codify colonial power and political dominance during the Early Modern Era and well into the Scramble for Africa.
About the Speaker
Andrew Kettler taught at the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2019 before serving as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 2019-2020 academic year. He is currently teaching at the University of South Carolina, Rutgers University, and Presbyterian College. His work has appeared in Senses and Society, Interface, Human Rights Review, the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Patterns of Prejudice, and the Australian Feminist Law Journal. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge 2020), focuses on the development of racist semantics concerning miasma and the contrasting expansion of aromatic consciousness in the making of subaltern resistance to racialized olfactory discourses of state, religious and slave masters.
Recorded Program
