Andrew Kettler's The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World is an important contribution to the small, yet expanding, library of sensory history. It also offers a timely engagement with the ongoing antiracist projects worldwide by bringing to light the aspect of embodied racialization at an early stage of race-making. Through the analytical lens of smell, Kettler traces discursive historical formations of the somatic knowledge of “African inferiority” in the age of Atlantic slavery. He argues that African bodies were coded as pungent and noxious in the Anglo-Atlantic discourse of sensibility in order to reinforce white superiority and justify the intertwined enterprises of slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. At the same time, the inherently malleable, transgressive capacity of odors facilitated subaltern resistance in the Atlantic littoral through evoking various African olfactory cultures. Whereas much has been written about environmental and bodily deodorization as a marker of Western modernity, this odoriferous history of “the other” sheds significant light on the richness and depths of the world history of the senses, and its profound entanglement with asymmetrical power relations that defined and continue to have an impact on the global structure of humanity. In this sense, The Smell of Slavery enriches our understandings and renews our consciousness regarding power, the body, and resistance.

The book has four chapters. In chapter 1, Kettler traces the roots of Atlantic racism, which, as Kettler contends, emerged from the English public sphere and popular mind well before the flourishing of racial discourses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The negative olfactory stereotyping of African bodies was a gradual process of construction through ethnographical observations of European travelers, the performative space of the English theater, and diverse religious, political, and popular texts disseminating among a core London population in the long seventeenth century. The racialized olfactory sensibility of the English body prepared for the coming of capitalism and the justification of slavery. In chapter 2, Kettler probes a dense web of medical, scientific, and popular discourses that collectively posited that black bodies were inherently stinking, and Africa was a continent of odor and disease. Specifically, Kettler examines so-called polygenetic racism, a popular Enlightenment belief that emphasized the emergence of different races from more than one original human coupling. This form of racial thinking evolved into scientific racism that further articulated the linkage of smell and disease, as biologically determined racial traits of black people, throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These pseudo-scientific theories laid the foundation for objectifying the African body as a commodity, awaiting to be cleansed, cured, and civilized by European modernity and capitalism.

While in the first part of the book Kettler delineates the development of a false sensory consciousness by European elites and slaveholders, in the second part he shifts the focus to subaltern patterns of smelling and diverse forms of sensory resistance within the slave culture. In chapter 3, Kettler locates an African sensorium prior to the Atlantic slave trade, one that demonstrates smell's rich involvement in religious, medical, aesthetic, and environmental traditions. Using anachronistic sources from later eras as an academic weapon against the prejudice and limits of colonized archives, Kettler recounts specific African understandings of odor and olfactory practices that entered upon the New World and became an invisible repository of memory, identity, and agency. In chapter 4, Kettler expands on these narratives and shows how the African retention of olfactory traditions served as weapons of the weak. Slaves and free blacks in the New World extensively applied traditional techniques of smelling out disease, herbal medicines, and scented spiritualism to assert their own forms of identity. They also developed olfactory strategies to resist their masters’ use of dogs, and deployed their knowledge of poison making within the Obeah tradition for the purpose of rebellion. Through the lens of olfaction, Kettler engages with the scholarship regarding African survivals and highlights the vital role of psychological resistance facilitated by the sense of smell.

Overall, The Smell of Slavery is a thoroughly researched book, building on a phenomenal command of primary sources and an extensive engagement with secondary literature. The copious references alone, which sometimes occupy two-thirds of a page, not only provide essential guidance for further research but also demonstrate key skills and methods for conducting olfactory research, which inevitably deals with elusive and dispersed material. This remarkable strength, however, seems to have produced a weakness of the book in relation to the organization and analysis of the primary sources. Simply put, the book does not read well, being repetitious, circulatory, verbose, and occasionally disjointed. It is not only a matter of prose or style; has more to do with the handling of source materials. The book would have benefited from a more selective approach to the primary literature, a more logical and cogent analysis, a clearer analytical structure within each chapter, and fewer repetitive claims. A related issue regards the inadequate analytical depths of the book. While Kettler asserts that the book is “driven by engaging more with structures of philosophy than the rigors of disciplinary history” (36), most philosophical or theoretical reflections remain slightly superficial, primarily in form of statement rather than reasoning. For example, Kettler says that chapter 1 is supposed to provide an application of Freud's concept of verschiebung (displacement) to articulate the social construction of African odors as a means to displace the Anglo-Saxon inferiority complex in the early modern era (42). An effective, interesting argument notwithstanding, in the following pages there is no cogent analysis of particular materials to illustrate how the process of verschiebung unfolded. Instead, there are only refashioned statements of the same. Despite these shortcomings, The Smell of Slavery is unquestionably a solid piece of scholarship and an essential reading in the burgeoning field of sensory studies, olfactory history in particular.