Empire of the Senses : Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America

Empire of the Senses introduces new approaches to the history of European imperialism in the Americas by questioning the role that the five senses played in framing the cultural encounters, colonial knowledge, and political relationships that built New World empires.

The essays in this volume include a range of new approaches to the history of the Americas and Atlantic empire that are informed by recent scholarship on sensory history. Rather than ascribing individual senses with dominant (or less dominant) meaning for Europeans, the essays in this collection largely follow a more flexible approach and reconstruct the contemporary significance of one or more senses within a concrete historical moment. Some of the essays highlight the social and political importance of hitherto underestimated senses (such as smell, taste and touch) for imperial projects and for transcultural encounter. As a consequence they challenge the “great divide” theory which contrasts an auditory, tactile pre-modern era with a visual, ahaptic modern one. Furthermore, some of the authors in this collection do not concentrate on one sense alone but argue for the critical interconnections between the senses. This “intersensoriality” comes closer to the way early modern writers themselves understood “the body’s senses in interconnected, networked terms.”