Across Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, touch, chemosensation, and sensitivity to DNA itself offer a basis for building kinship relations that stretch across both species and interplanetary boundaries. In Dawn (1987), for instance, surviving a planetary apocalypse and centuries of racial capitalist violence and war making requires the reeducation of the senses. When she wakes up on a spaceship after nuclear war has made most of Earth uninhabitable, the protagonist Lilith Iyapo must slowly overcome her conditioned visual responses (“Look at me,” insists Lilith’s Oankali companion) and then learn to interact with a being whose face is filled with “sensory tentacles” (Butler [1987] 2000: 15). She is genetically recoded thanks to the preternatural sensitivity of the third gender known as ooloi (who can sense and manipulate DNA) and becomes capable of communicating through chemical cues. Through the transmission of olfactory chemical signals, “Strangers of a different species [are] accepted as family” (196). By challenging the supremacy of vision as a tool and metaphor for knowledge, by centering a Black woman’s struggle for survival and reproductive futurity as a site of relationalities that exceed the sensorium of Enlightenment “Man,” and by exploring the embodied sensorium (including nonconsensual chemosensation) as a pathway toward more-than-human kinships, Butler’s novel offers a generative model for emergent scholarship in sensory studies, an interdisciplinary field organized around the premise that sensory perception is a social rather than strictly neurological construct.
This special issue hazards the hypothesis that literary criticism and sensory studies are mutually sustaining fields of inquiry. That the senses and the symbolic are coextensive is a truth so obvious as to be invisible; sensation is inscribed into the etymological meaning of aesthetics (aisthetikos in Greek) as “of or relating to sensation.” To be sure, reshaping sensory aesthetics has long been a vital concern in the theory and practice of US literature: along with Butler’s speculative experiments with sensorial estrangement, we might think of the “howling wilderness” invoked by Cotton Mather to animate Puritan exceptionalism, Walt Whitman proclaiming the holiness of his touch and armpit aroma, Herman Melville on the homoerotic and interspecies communion of squeezing spermaceti, Henry David Thoreau’s effort to “[train] into his writing the alertness of his senses” (Matthiessen 1941: 93), the “most terrible spectacle” of Frederick Douglass’s (1845: 6) primal scene, and Saidiya Hartman’s (1997: 3) refusal to reproduce it. Nonetheless, the field of American literary studies has only occasionally engaged with work in sensory studies. Given the long-standing Western dichotomy between form and matter, between representation and experience, and between artistic mediation and lived immediacy, this oversight among literary scholars is perhaps unsurprising. Literary criticism’s tendency to focus on matters of textual representation, in conjunction with its origins in liberal humanism, has often directed critical attention away from the diverse sensory modes in which we interact with literature—and which literature itself enacts. Several questions motivate this special issue: How does poetic language extend rather than reflect sensory experience? Is literature itself not a sensitizing mechanism, a means of cultivating attention to more kinds of feelings within and outside us? What methods might we use to engage with the sensory dimensions of literature—including nonrepresentational and more-than-human sensory interactions—without universalizing historically and culturally particular sensoria? And, conversely, how might attuning to literature’s sensory pleasures shift our methods of reading and contextualizing texts, as well as how we teach and write about literature?
It is no mere coincidence that Butler imagined a posthuman future requiring the activation of new sensations in the same decade that sensory studies took shape as a research field: when the Reaganite neoliberal order hastened environmental crises and exacerbated racial and class disparities, and scholars responded to the limits of linguistically focused poststructuralist analysis by examining the lively materiality of human and nonhuman worlds. Grounded in the anthropological studies of David Howes and Constance Classen—as well as the foundational scholarship of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, psychologist J. J. Gibson, and ecophenomenologist David Abram, among others—sensory studies investigates the historical contingency, cultural variety, and biopolitical deployment of sense perception. As Howes (2022) writes, sensory studies scholars seek to “liberate the senses from the artificial confines of the psychology laboratory” and explore how they function across a range of everyday contexts. By attending to the social variability of sensory experience and discourse, this interdisciplinary field has demonstrated how sensory discipline—for example, the hierarchy of the five classical senses—has been mobilized in the service of colonial, racist, and heteronormative models of embodiment and epistemology.
Yet, until recently, sensory studies has not engaged with formative research on these topics in fields such as critical ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies. Gus Stadler’s (2015) provocation “On Whiteness and Sound Studies” resonates across the entire field of sensory studies: “I’m struck . . . by the relative absence of a certain strain of work . . . an approach that is difficult to characterize but that is probably best approximated by the term ‘American Studies.’ Over the past two decades, this field has emerged as an especially vibrant site for the sustained, nuanced exploration of forms of social difference, race in particular.” As shown by recent work on topics ranging from the “sensory practices of colonialism” (Hacke and Musselwhite 2017) and “slavery, segregation, and the senses” (Smith 2006) to “the sonic color line” (Stoever 2016) and “the felt politics of racial embodiment” (Sekimoto and Brown 2020), the modern sensorium cannot be disentangled from the histories of racial and colonial capitalism. In addition to exploring the senses as tools of violence, extraction, and exclusion, critical ethnic studies scholars—for example, Amber Jamilla Musser (2018), Ren Ellis Neyra (2020), and Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah) (Robinson 2020)—have also explored the queer, antiracist, and decolonial potentialities of sensory experience.
This important and growing body of scholarship on the power asymmetries embedded in the classical sensory hierarchy has facilitated efforts to interrogate sensory experiences excluded from Western sensory orderings—for example, proprioception, thermoception, interoception—and has shown how they vary across historical, cultural, and biopolitical divides. Contra the Aristotelian model of the senses as a means of extracting information from the outside world, these embodied senses focus more on perceiving how we neuronally and metabolically interact with our surroundings. As Desiree Förster (2021: 75) explains, “Interoception senses changes in the hormonal, chemical, and thermoregulatory states that impact the way we feel and how much physical energy we have in a situation, and therefore influences our intentions and actions. The body thereby enables sensory experience not only external to itself in the environment, but also sensory experience of internal biochemical processes.” Nicole Starosielski (2022: 8, 7) has modeled an approach to “critical temperature studies” that can attune us to the vital role of thermoception in sustaining media infrastructures and in the production of “gender, race, class, ethnicity, and other forms of social difference.” While thermal sensation goes some way toward explaining forms of infrastructural and embodied violence, the atmosphere itself (not only temperature and humidity but also light and sound) has become an object of calibration and a means of managing the circulation of bodies through specific environments. The scientific and artistic manipulation of “what counts as a habitable environment and for whom that environment appears livable,” media theorist Yuriko Furuhata (2022: 4) has demonstrated, operates by turning sensory stimuli into a mode of social control. At the heart of this new generation of sensory studies, then, sensation—in all its ineffability and raucousness—is the hinge upon which the more-than-human world and the all-too-human world pivot.
As the contributors to this special issue demonstrate, when literary critics attend to the aesthetic and political contexts of sensory perception, not only do new heuristics emerge for studying sensory embodiment in a variety of aesthetic and cultural contexts but also new texts and textualities, new literary genealogies, and new ways of reading become available. This special issue showcases the literary and textual practices that simulate as well as stimulate sensory experiences to recalibrate relations between aesthetics and violence, being and knowing, and space and time. Authors consider gustatory encounters, atmospheric volatility, tactile communication, and psychotropic substances that pressure the bounds of human subjectivity at scales both personal and planetary, historical and ecological.
Crucially, the sensory experiences described in this special issue advance posthumanist perspectives while also resisting them. A Deleuzian philosophy around which the new materialisms, object oriented ontology, and agential realism constellate, posthumanism gathered force at the turn of the twenty-first century by taking the liveliness of matter (rather than the instability of signification) as an entry point into social analysis. In so doing, it rejected a key epistemological condition facilitating the Western fantasy of human mastery: anthropocentrism. As propounded by thinkers like Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, and Karen Barad, to theorize the conditions of human and nonhuman being through materiality is to affirm a specific set of beliefs: that the material world is composed of dynamic assemblages, not static subjects; that agency is distributive, not unidirectional; that biological processes are transformative, not deterministic; that bodies are potential becomings, not bounded entities; and that affect is a preconscious intensity, not a meaningful emotion. These beliefs constitute what might be called the “posthumanist thesis”: that the material world, intra-active in its formation and nonhierarchical in its organization, contains within it the means for dismantling anthropocentric and Eurocentric epistemologies. Athwart transcendental and humanist traditions of thought, the posthumanist subject is not a self-sovereign agent but an enfleshed, fluctuating site of external influences and outwardly unfolding affects.
But decoupling the world of matter from the anthropocentric telos of history does not come without risk. In fact, many Indigenous scholars have pointed out that there is very little new about new materialisms. Reproducing a kind of disciplinary colonialism in the very act of claiming to dismantle Eurocentric binaries of matter/spirit, posthumanist criticism typically has called upon its own genealogy of thought—with the troublesome effect of erasing the First Nations and Indigenous knowledge traditions that long preceded Western thought. Rosi Braidotti (2000: 159), for instance, has described new materialisms as “Descartes’ nightmare, Spinoza’s hope, Nietzsche’s complaint, Freud’s obsession, Lacan’s favorite fantasy.” Thus, even as posthumanism in general and feminist new materialisms in particular have examined the entanglement of bodies in relations of power, privileging relations of matter and decentering the human has involved white scholars’ appropriation of Asian, Indigenous, and African ontologies and epistemologies. Indeed, one of the most thoroughgoing criticisms of the new materialisms is that it has abandoned the human stakes of aliveness in a historical present haunted by the colonial fungibility of people and things, of converting certain people into objects while imbuing some objects with personhood.
As suggested by its title, “Senses with/out Subjects,” rather than cede the ground of humanism, this special issue explores the necessary incompleteness of the human and the refusal of all living things to being perceptually and politically apprehended in their entirety. The articles included in this issue offer important contributions to the “post-posthumanist” scholarship that critically engages with new materialisms—from Mel Chen’s (2012) examination of the racialized materiality of animacy and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning’s (Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation) work on Indigenous worlding practices (Manning 2017) to Neel Ahuja’s (2016) study of the entanglement of species and environments within the biopolitics of empire. In so doing, these essays participate in a critical genealogy that blends postcolonial and race studies perspectives with posthumanism in its rejection of anthropocentrism. In their challenges to the liberal conception of Man as a rational subject and an ideal citizen, Black thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter have argued that the human is neither a universal category nor a transcendent truth but a historical construct wielded by empires to delimit who is (white people, men) and is not (women, disabled people, people of color) worthy of human rights, social membership, and democratic citizenship. Crucially, the ordering of the senses played an essential role in this project: as Wynter (2003: 260) explains, the overrepresentation of “Man” as the bearer of freedom and rationality requires a sharp distinction between this white, patriarchal, bourgeois figure of the human and those Others who “are made to embody the postulate of ‘significant ill’ of enslavement to the lower, sensory aspects of ‘human nature.’” All the while, sensation itself indexes state violence against those relegated to the “lower” sensory order of humanity. Take, for instance, the connection identified by prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba (2015) between summer heat and hypersurveillance: warm weather invites young Black people to inhabit contested public spaces where “residents collude with law enforcement to police and enforce boundaries.” This dynamic tradition of minoritarian critique establishes the ontological fragmentation, epistemic ruptures, and temporal discontinuity generated by sensory materiality as integral to practices of human survival, especially when recovery or overcoming (a narrative arc that invariably leads back to Man) is neither desirable nor readily available.
The contributions to this special issue constitute a decisive redistribution of the sensible. In his influential formulation of the “distribution of the sensible,” philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004: 13) linked sense perception to politics by arguing that aesthetics “is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.” The aesthetic, in other words, is inherently political because it reorganizes the sensible; it redraws the bounds of what is sayable, visible, and audible and which groups can be seen, can speak, can be heard. While aesthetics has the capacity to upend regimes of truth and representation, as Rancière claims, it also has the potential to generate what Kandice Chuh (2019: xi) calls “illiberal humanisms”: the apprehension of uncommon sensibilities that run athwart liberal common sense by materializing relationality (rather than individuality) as the grounds of human ontology. In varying ways, each author in this special issue takes up Chuh’s (2019: 22) call to disentangle humanism from its liberal iteration in order to recover “a human subjectivity formed in fuller, embodied relation to the world.” By examining the illiberal sensibilities formalized in minoritarian literatures, from twentieth-century Ho-Chunk autobiography and disability writing to contemporary Vietnamese American poetry and Black feminist speculative fiction, these articles bring the insights of critical new materialisms to bear on the literary study of sensation, offering a redistribution of the sensible that illuminates the transitivity of subject and objecthood, that rethinks representational histories, and that instantiates new ways of proliferating accounts of the human (in all its variations and iterations) in a more-than-human world. What emerges is both a new “sense” of sensation as formalizing some of the broadest debates underpinning racial modernity and new literary histories that plot an enfleshed aesthetics shaped by nature, culture, and power.
In “Moved by Another Life: Altered Sentience and Historical Poiesis in the Peyote Craze,” Sylvie Boulette reads the General Allotment Act as a chronobiological project intended to impose settler-capitalist framings of individuated, cumulative time and to “extract Native lives from the sacred durations of the earth and the animacy of living environments.” Against this context, Boulette details the unruly “sonic, kinesthetic, and transsensory pathways” opened up by the Peyote Road, which enabled access to a sense of time and embodiment irreducible to “the regularity and immediacy of regimes of work and rest.” Through nuanced readings of episodic structures and sensory descriptions of peyotism in Sam Blowsnake’s (Ho-Chunk) Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), Boulette develops a fascinating account of “an Indigenous medium of mobile association and persistence through ecstatic discontinuations of the already-accumulated future.”
In “Extra Consciousness, Extra Fingers: Automatic Writing and Disabled Authorship,” Clare Mullaney reads Gertrude Stein’s and Lucille Clifton’s practices of automatic writing as sites of productive intersection between disability and embodied sensory experience. Mullaney argues that Stein and Clifton harness the creative potential of embodied “extra” senses—sensorial experiences that exceed patriarchal, white supremacist, and ableist taxonomies of sensation. Theorizing automatic writing not as an absence of subjectivity but as an extra consciousness, “Stein reclaims . . . the sensing body as a neglected source of knowledge production.” Clifton, by contrast, positions herself as a medium for her ancestors’ voices, channeled in part through her additional finger that was removed at birth. Reading these authors’ work as feminist revisions of the gendered and ableist hierarchies that grounded nineteenth-century Spiritualism, Mullaney shows how they practiced writing not as a mode of liberal individual authorship but as a way of channeling embodied sensation and feeling, as well as “what is told by others through their bodies.”
Sunhay You’s “Sweetness of Race: On Synesthesia, Addiction, and Self-Possessed Personhood in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth” frames synesthesia as both a literary and a neurological experience that has the potential to interrupt and reorganize racial sensoria. Focusing on Monique Truong’s representation of a transnational Vietnamese adoptee’s lexical-gustatory synesthesia in Bitter in the Mouth (2010), You considers how both white supremacy and its violent appetite for racial intimacies are sustained by a cultural addiction to sweetness. Synesthesia unsettles the racial sensorium’s reliance on visual and gustatory regimentations of intersectional identity, instead highlighting “the body’s materiality and its sheer capacity to feel in excess of those preestablished networks of meaning.” The plasticity and errancy of Linda’s sensory experience activate possibilities for interiority, cross-racial affiliation, and queer intimacy that refuse the defensive psychic structures of whiteness and its addictive racial intimacies.
In “Touching Ash in Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics,” David Pham explores the sensorial qualities of fire and ash as vital “matter metaphors” in recent works by the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong and the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Turning aside from the centrality of water in Vietnamese refugee imaginaries, Pham traces how haptic encounters with fire and ash open onto a “pyric ontoepistemology of the refugee” that blends personal knowledge, histories of imperial violence, and material being. While Vuong and Nguyen attend to fire’s shattering, traumatizing, and even apocalyptic capacities, they also dwell on the paradoxical experience of touching ash—an insensible, opaque material whose beauty punctuates the world so that something else might yet follow. Pham’s work models a generative dialogue between sensory studies and Edouard Glissant’s theorization of opacity, inviting us to sit with that which escapes or refuses existing terms of perceptibility not as a problem but as a source of confounding beauty.
Shouhei Tanaka’s “Black Feminist Geohaptics and the Broken Earth” brings sensory studies into generative dialogue with new materialist and Black feminist approaches to theorizing the Anthropocene. Through striking readings of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive (2018) and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, the article makes a compelling case for “the centrality of sensory praxis to ecological thought.” For Tanaka, these works bring forth new sensorial and ecological futures through geohaptics—a reciprocal, ecological touch that refuses the instrumentalist distribution of the sensible that has sustained racial capitalism’s violent and extractive conceptions of environment, geology, and the human. Thus, Gumbs renders the ongoing ecologies of the Middle Passage through intimate and reciprocal relations of breath and touch, and Jemisin instantiates an insurgent, anticolonial sensorium attuned—through sensuous “temperatures, pressures, [and] reverberations”—to the sensorial agency of geological materials. More broadly, Tanaka’s article exemplifies the political and aesthetic stakes of an approach to speculative literature that centers techniques of sensorial world making.
Collectively, these contributions demonstrate what we might call a post-posthumanist sensory studies that has the potential to reorient literary studies toward our varied, contingent, and sometimes transformative modes of sensorial interaction. Indeed, they register broader efforts within the expanding field of sensory studies to bring the disability, gender, and racial politics of the “bodymind” (Price 2014) to bear on the seemingly apolitical “earthbodies” (Mazis 2002) that populate nonhuman environments. By attuning to the senses as malleable capacities of relationality and world making, the authors articulate the generative modes of ecological relation, historical inquiry, speculative praxis, temporal possibility, and ontoepistemology articulated by a diverse literary archive. In a moment of planetary crisis shaped by racial capitalism’s ongoing projects of sensory bureaucratization, commodification, surveillance, hierarchy, denigration, and simulation, these contributions exemplify generative approaches to engaging with literature as a powerful site for experimenting with more equitable, ecologically responsible, and illiberal redistributions of the senses.
