She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell, and reported the following:
There are only five words on page 99: PART II SMELLSCAPES IN FLUX. I was disappointed, until I suddenly realised how well the test actually works for my book. The five (or rather, three) words, in fact, captures the essence of the 298-page book in its own precise and even poetic way. In a nutshell, my book traces the changing smellscapes in modern China, intertwined with many drastic shifts in socio-political spheres and bodily norms and sensibilities. A broader point my book makes is concerned with the fluidity of smell perception and the inconsistency of the sensorial realm.Learn more about Scents of China at the Cambridge University Press website.
To what extent is the argument about the amorphous state of the smellscape important? This question should be discussed in the context of the master narrative of olfactory modernity forged first by Alain Corbin (in The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination). Corbin’s intellectual pursuit unveils how the now internalized olfactory codes—deodorized environments and bodies, a distaste for strong-smelling perfumes, etc. —were developed under the rubric of ‘modernity’. Ultimately the goal of the modern olfactory revolution seems to be about redefining what is foul and what is fragrant, or in other words, about reorganising smellscapes according to a new set of rules. China is inescapably tied to such an olfactory revolution, but in actual historical practices, are smells governable according to a certain blueprint? Part II of my book, starting from page 99, tries to answer this question.
The two chapters in this part track how different social actors enforced the ‘deodorization’ law within Chinese smellscapes, and how colonial capitalism promoted mass-manufactured perfumes in relation to hygiene and health, contributing to the technologies of the modern body. However, paradoxes emerged during these processes, just as malodours resurfaced outside the zone of modernization. Much of the content after page 99 shows how volatile molecules in our environments and indeterminate neurons in our brains encounter in myriad ways, making programmed olfactory modernity not entirely sustainable.
Smellscapes are constantly in flux, crossing borders and defying definitions. It’s a matter of common sense that can be easily forgotten, or repressed by our rational mind. That is the message on page 99, which also reverberates throughout my whole book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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