num_pages: 352
description: Fragrance has long been used to mark who is civilized and who is barbaric who is pure and who is polluted who is free and who is damnedFocusing their gaze on our most primordial sense writer and perfumer Tanas weaves a brilliant and expansive memoir a reckoning that offers a critical alternate history of South Asia from an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. From stories of their childhood in the South Midwest and New York; to transcendent experiences with lovers psychedelics and fragrances; to trips home to their motherland Tanas builds a universe of memories and scent: a sensorium. Alongside their personal history and at the very heart of this work is an interrogation of the ancient violence of caste rape culture patriarchy war and the inherited ancestral trauma of being from a lush land constantly denuded a land still threatened and disappearing because of colonization capitalism and climate change. Structured like a perfumemoving from base to heart to head notesIN SENSORIUM interlaces eons of South Asian perfume history erotic and religious texts survivor testimonies and material culture with memoir. In Sensorium is archive and art illuminating the great crises of our time with the language of Liberation.
language: English
title: In Sensorium: Notes for My People
publisher: Harper