Book chapter in Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite (eds.), Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America, (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Empire of the Senses

Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America

Series: Early American History Series, Volume: 8

Volume Editors: Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite

Abstract: Empire of the Senses brings together pathbreaking scholarship on the role the five senses played in early America. With perspectives from across the hemisphere, exploring individual senses and multi-sensory frameworks, the volume explores how sensory perception helped frame cultural encounters, colonial knowledge, and political relationships. From early French interpretations of intercultural touch, to English plans to restructure the scent of Jamaica, these essays elucidate different ways the expansion of rival European empires across the Americas involved a vast interconnected range of sensory experiences and practices. Empire of the Senses offers a new comparative perspective on the way European imperialism was constructed, operated, implemented and, sometimes, counteracted by rich and complex new sensory frameworks in the diverse contexts of early America. Read more >>

This book has been listed on the Books of Note section on the website of Sensory Studies, which is dedicated to highlighting the top books in sensory studies: www.sensorystudies.org/books-of-note

CONTENTS

Introduction

Making Sense of Colonial Encounters and New Worlds (Authors: Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite)

Part 1: Cultural Encounters

Chapter 1: Touching on Communication: Visual and Textual Representations of Touch as Friendship in Early Colonial Encounters (Author: Céline Carayon)

Chapter 2: Mission Soundscapes: Demons, Jesuits, and Sounds in Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s Conquista Espiritual (1639) (Author: Jutta Toelle)

Chapter 3: Singing with Strangers in Early Seventeenth-Century New France (Author: Michaela Ann Cameron)

Part 2 Colonial Subjectivity

Chapter 4 The Pain of Senses Escaping: Eighteenth-Century Europeans and the Sensory Challenges of the Caribbean (Author: Annika Raapke)

Chapter 5: Color Visions: Perceiving Nature in the Portuguese Atlantic World (Author: Marília dos Santos Lopes)

Part 3: Structures of Knowledge

Chapter 6: Colonial Sensescapes: Thomas Harriot and the Production of Knowledge (Author: Daniela Hacke)

Chapter 7: Merian and the Pineapple: Visual Representation of the Senses (Authors: Megan Baumhammer and Claire Kennedy)

Chapter 8: “Delightful a Fragrance”: Native American Olfactory Aesthetics within the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Botanical Community (Author: Andrew Kettler)

Part 4: Colonial Projects

Chapter 9: The Aromas of Flora’s Wide Domains: Cultivating Gardens, Aromas, and Political Subjects in the Late Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic (Author: Kate Mulry)

Chapter 10: Exploring Underwater Worlds: Diving in the Late Seventeenth-/Early Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Author: Rebekka von Mallinckrodt)