When viewing the horrific image of a slave ship, one of the many dreadful things that comes to mind is the wretched odor that Africans had to endure. Smell, as Kettler outlines in his new book, permeated more than just the Middle Passage in the history of African slavery in the Americas. It was also a critical sense in the formulation of racial ideas and in the everyday struggles of enslaved people. Through four engaging chapters, Kettler argues that Europeans affixed concepts of savagery to Africans and their descendants through constructed imaginations of their smell, which was critical to the development of a pseudo-scientific belief in biological race and the implementation of its worst abuses.
Although grounded in the past, The Smell of Slavery incorporates several scholarly approaches “driven by engaging more with structures of philosophy than the rigors of disciplinary history” (36). Kettler is first concerned with Renaissance literature...