In 2010, Old Spice’s online ad campaign featuring Isaiah Mustafa as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” went viral, attracting about 19 million views and doubling sales of Old Spice’s Red Zone body-wash over a matter of months.¹ The ads were widely praised for presenting a charming, confident Black man as an exemplar of masculine sex appeal: as Cord Jefferson put it in The Root, “not only are his strength, intelligence and beauty at the forefront of his character, they’re heralded as being at the apex of manhood.”² In Jefferson’s view, the “Old Spice Guy” reversed longstanding patterns of anti-Black thought that have long associated Blackness with animalistic sexuality and intolerable odors.³

Does presenting a half-naked Black man to the ad’s target audience of middle-class women as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” reverse historically engrained racist ideas, or does it just repackage them? Scented deodorants and soaps are entangled with centuries-old histories of Euro-American deodorization and olfactory racism. In the West, deodorization has played a prominent role in the “civilizing process,”⁴ which legitimates colonialism by constructing racial and civilizational hierarchies. As public health experts beginning in the eighteenth century sought to eradicate unwanted smells in public spaces, slavery and colonialism produced and stigmatized associations between Black and Brown laboring bodies and noxious odors. Deodorized spaces and bodies offered an empty canvas for bourgeois practices of olfactory narcissism that privileged “delicate and pleasant”⁵ scents — many of which were procured through colonial bioprospecting and plantation agriculture. On the one hand, Europeans and Americans extracted botanical scents from “exotic” locations and introduced processes of colonial terraforming that transformed Indigenous smellscapes⁶; on the other hand, they stigmatized Black and Brown people living in those regions as malodorous.

If “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” marks a shift in racial ideology, it does so merely by selectively, provisionally recognizing some Black elites as pleasant-smelling, sexy, and civilized even as Black people continue to be targeted by police violence, mass incarceration, and — following Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s influential definition of racism — other forms of “state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”⁷ With his mystical ability to call forth settings (“You’re on a boat…you’re on a horse…”) and objects (an oyster, tickets to “that thing you love,” a handful of diamonds) at will, Mustafa is cast as a paradigmatic “Magical Negro.”⁸ But, as with all magic, the trick lies not in what is conjured forth but in what’s made to disappear: most immediately, the history of colonial atrocities and racialized labor behind a handful of diamonds; but, more fundamentally, the “afterlife of slavery,” ongoing relations of coloniality, and dynamics of environmental injustice that envelop BIPOC populations in noxious air.⁹ Like the exotic names used to sell deodorants (e.g., Tahitian Breeze, Hawaiian Tropic, Fiji, Native, Africa, Dark Temptation), the Old Spice Guy obscures racial capitalism’s longstanding investments in botanical colonialism and olfactory racism.

In their 2015 spoken-word performance, “Deodorant,” the Samoan American poet William Nu′utupu Giles resurfaces the suppressed histories of racial capitalism that underlie processes and technologies of deodorization. Giles begins by parodying Isaiah Mustafa’s lines from the viral Old Spice ad: “Hello ladies/ Look at your man/ Now back to me/ Now back at your man/ Now back to me/ Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat!”¹⁰ But the boat in this poem is no luxury yacht. Whereas Old Spice (originally “Early American Old Spice”) has, since its founding in 1937, used images of clipper ships to capitalize on nostalgia for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americana, Giles quickly reminds us that ships were essential technologies for colonial conquest and the Atlantic slave trade:

so I’m browsing the deodorant aisle
scanning what exploited people I’d like to smell like for the next month & I can’t decide between
Axe’s “Africa Lynx” & Old Spice’s “Fiji”
but as a proud Polynesian male, I just want to know how they made those scents

if in 1874 when the native Fijian population was almost wiped out
& Fiji was officially ceded to Great Britain if they
bottled the tears that they found in that year
if they kept them in casks & let them ferment to be saved & sold here

or if they found the wreckage of a ship used to cross the middle passage
sanded down wood from the beams & took embedded slave teeth
Is the “Africa” that is sold by a British & Dutch company called AXE
the same one
that was stolen with British & Dutch guns (“D”)

The idea of a scent made from bottled Fijian tears and teeth recovered from the beams of a slave ship’s hold draws attention to the colonial conditions under which many aromatic products — such as nutmeg, vanilla, sandalwood, vetiver, and shea butter —were “discovered” and extracted for Western markets.¹¹ Through processes of slavery and colonialism, human and ecological suffering are distilled into sensorially pleasurable products. Although its actual scent components are listed simply as “fragrance,” Axe’s “Africa” scent refers to a range of exotic ingredients: bergamot and mandarin orange, a middle note of geranium, and base notes of tonka bean, vanilla, Egyptian balsam, sandalwood, musk, and cedar. Of these, only Egyptian balsam is indigenous to the African continent.¹²

Giles goes on to suggest that enslaved bodies were themselves essential elements of Western processes of deodorization: “Was a slave this nation’s first anti-perspirant?/ just something you bought to make you sweat less” (“D”)? Slavery, “blackbirding” (a practice of kidnapping and forced servitude that targeted Indigenous people in the South Pacific, including in Fiji), and other modes of racialized labor— along with racially segregated patterns of housing, infrastructure, and wealth distribution— function to differentiate bodies and body odors, and to segregate the air itself.

Reimagining the Old Spice Guy’s idyllic boat as a vital technology that wove together racial capitalism’s global web of human and environmental depredation, Giles continues:

you’re on a boat that sends guns & textiles from Europe
to trade for slaves that provided labor in the
Americas to grow cotton, tobacco, & cane
you’re on a boat
with the groans of the dying with the songs the forest caught in the mud of our throats
with hunger so harsh our bellies turn to stone
so they can digest the iron from nails we pulled from the wood. (“D”)

Throughout the history of racial capitalism, maritime voyages enabled the Atlantic slave trade and Euro-Americans’ overseas empires, along with the vast plantations that were pivotal sites of capital accumulation and that transformed colonial landscapes and smellscapes (so much so that scholars including Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway have proposed renaming the Anthropocene the “Plantationocene”).¹³ The effects of transformed Indigenous smellscapes reach far beyond individual sensory experience: they displace ecological and atmospheric materials that play vital roles in collective memory, ceremony, and interspecies kinships.¹⁴

“Deodorant” traces the “afterlife of slavery” into the twenty-first century, invoking historical continuities between slavery and contemporary climate disasters like Hurricane Katrina, whose casualties are disproportionately Black and Brown. “in five years, will I be able to coat my armpits with the scent of ‘Levees Breaking’/ will those advertisements show women drowning by the hundreds in the hurricane/ unable to resist my scent?” (“D”) Referencing a widely criticized Axe body spray advertisement in which a horde of women converges on a young man on a beach,¹⁵ Giles denounces the cynicism of deodorant companies’ post-racial and exoticizing rhetoric amid the twenty-first century’s continuing anti-Black violence.

For Giles, deodorization is

just the latest stage of colonization[…]
steal your culture,
exoticize it
eroticize it
water it down
then sell the name back to you, just to throw you off the scent
That way, if you ever return home to a motherland you never knew
it will disgust you
it will be an unfamiliar bouquet, that smells nothing like that body deodorant spray (“D”)

Here, Giles draws attention to the psychologically deracinating effects of deodorization, which either eradicates or stigmatizes both body odors and culturally and geographically specific smells. “Deodorant” concludes by repudiating the olfactory fantasies promised by Axe’s “Africa” and Old Spice’s “Fiji” scents, acknowledging Giles’s own sweaty body as a “sweeter” alternative:

I will buy nothing
from the black market that broke into my neighbor’s home & stole the garden, whole.
look down back up where are you?
you are not here.
you are not in Africa, you are not in Fiji. you are leaving the bottle on the counter
even your sweat
smells of sweeter things
than that. (“D”)

Throughout their performance, Giles’s embodied rage and explosive delivery present a striking contrast with the Old Spice Guy’s capricious charm. The poem’s concluding affirmation of Giles’s sweat rejects not only specific fragrances and marketing campaigns, but the entire civilizational project of deodorization that has recruited the visceral and immediate sense of smell as a tool for drawing racial and social boundaries.

Giles’s poem voices a deep ambivalence about commodified fragrances. Reflecting on the legacies of olfactory racism and olfactory colonization, Giles asks, “is the scent that attracts sex, violence?” (“D”) By evoking the histories of racial capitalism that underlie many commercial fragrances, “Deodorant” adds a compelling critique of olfactory racism to more common criticisms of Axe body products’ appeal to (and atmospheric manifestation of) toxic masculinity. While Giles’s rejection of scented deodorant offers a well-reasoned response to capitalism’s commodification and weaponization of fragrance, other artists have responded to the historical legacies of deodorization by exploring olfactory modes of experience, eroticism, and care that exceed colonialism’s grasp.

For example, the late Kanaka Maoli poet, scholar, and activist Haunani-Kay Trask responds to what she calls the “stench of colonialism” emitted by military bases, golf courses, settler infrastructure, and agricultural pesticides by calling attention to Indigenous smells that cannot be deodorized or eradicated by colonial terraforming.¹⁶ In Night is a Sharkskin Drum (2002), Trask balances critiques of colonialism’s deracinating smells (in a section titled “A Fragrance of Devouring,” she describes “smelly shores,” a “damp stench of money,” and Japanese tourists “smelling/ of greasy perfume, tanning with the stench/ of empire”¹⁷) with poems that present decolonial perspectives on the landscape and the senses. “To Hear the Mornings,” for example, includes a striking invocation of breath:

To breathe the Akua:
       lehua and makani,
               pua and lā′ī,
                      maile and palai,…
                                 pungent kino lau.

To sense the ancients,
              Ka wā mamua—from time before.¹⁸

From within colonialism’s stench, Trask underscores the longstanding relations between breathing and divinity in Kanaka Maoli cosmology. The book’s glossary explains that Akua refers to “God, supernatural, divine”; other words name an assortment of fragrant flowers (pua, lehua), flowering vines (maile), ferns (palai), and leaves (lā′ī) which are associated with the divine. Makani (“wind, breeze”) names another sensuous, olfactory feature of Hawaiian geography.¹⁹ The pungent “kino lau” in the stanza’s concluding line refers to the “Many forms taken by a god, such as the ti leaf as a form of the mo′o (lizard) god.”²⁰ Here, kinship is both genealogical and material: in accordance with Kanaka Maoli cosmogonies, all forms of life are descended from the gods, and their breath sustains — and is sustained by — direct and ongoing connection to “the ancients.” Whereas missionaries and other agents of colonial “civilization” stigmatized and attempted to eradicate Indigenous Pacific modes of olfactory knowledge and intimacy (for example by misapprehending the honi or nose press as an atavistic olfactory practice²¹), Trask centers olfaction as a sensory capacity that involves intimate material exchange with both environment and divinity. In other poems, Trask emphasizes smell as a mode of relation that is simultaneously geographic and erotic. In a poem that invokes “Slow-hipped Kāne′ohe,/wet-scented lover//chanting/us in,” Trask notes that “Kāne′ohe” can refer to a “Land division on the windward side of O′ahu” as well as “the bamboo of the god Kāne; or, alternately, bamboo husband.”²² Another poem turns to the smell of rock slits as a natural, sensuous resource for a precarious fern: “where the fern/clings, lingering/above slit//rock, shadows/musky in hot perfume….”²³ Where Giles concludes “Deodorant” by affirming the smell of their own sweat, Trask expands this affirmation to encompass Hawaii’s diverse, naturally-occurring smells, from its fragrant indigenous flowers to “pungent” and “musky” forms of divinity. Trask’s lyrical descriptions evoke the resilience and power of Hawaii’s indigenous odors — as well as the importance of recuperating smell as a vital mode of imbibing environmental and spiritual knowledge.

Tanaïs (Tanwi Nandini Islam), a Bangladeshi American novelist and perfumer, models a practice of olfactory biography and aromatic care in their MALA podcast and perfume project.²⁴ MALA — an acronym for “memory as living art,” but also Sanskrit for a garland of flowers and Spanish for a “bad woman” — features interviews in which Tanaïs makes space for five formerly incarcerated women to “retell their stories of survival & reimagine them as scents.”²⁵ Drawing on these interviews, Tanaïs creates perfumes intended to support the memories and well-being of Black women whose sensory experience had been neutralized by years spent in alternately deodorized and malodorous carceral spaces. Introducing the podcast’s first episode, Tanaïs explains that “a prison is the very absence of scent, of sensuality. There’s only staleness….”²⁶ The subject of that episode, Sharon, describes her release from incarceration in sensory terms: “do you want to know what it smelled like the day that I left prison? Freedom. I smelt the air. I felt seawater[…]. I smelled all the things that were happy for me when I was a child. The crystalness of the sun and the water. I smelled curry. I smelled — you know, like, I was out the door.”²⁷ In an effort to bring these impressions together, Tanaïs created a perfume for Sharon that blends “blood cedar, seaweed, turmeric, pimento berry, allspice, and amber and ocean.”²⁸ Another subject, Tasha, describes the smell of prison as “dark” and “dry,” and reports that, when she was able to obtain scents, they sustained her emotional and mental wellbeing: “It made you feel good to have something scented when you had those things, it just made you feel like kind of free in the moment, you know, because that’s what you do in the world: you find scents that agree with your chemistry and it makes you feel good…it just made you feel like, okay, a little piece of you you know you still have, you didn’t lose everything you still have a little piece of…who you are.”²⁹ Mary recalls that, while incarcerated, she used to “pray for Pine Sol to clean, just so I could smell the freshness…when I did get it I’d salvage it just to keep that odor, I didn’t want that stale odor, I didn’t want that stench, I didn’t want none of that around me, I had to have that cuz I didn’t want to smell what I was smelling….”³⁰ After spending twenty-five years in prison for a crime she did not commit, Claude now wears a range of perfumes — including some inherited from her mother, a Voudun practitioner who created her own perfumes.³¹ Drawing on Claude’s memories, Tanaïs creates a perfume that is “bright and tropical, inspired by her youth, her Haitian heritage, a perfume as a getaway… The top sparkles with juicy citrus notes of white and pink grapefruit and bergamot — an homage to her father’s cologne. For the heart, I go full on tropics: gardenia core and fatty coconut milk. And the base is an amber musk reminiscent of sacred incense, Vodou, and her mother, where Claude’s life began.”³² The “perfume as a getaway,” here, is a far cry from the exotic branding of scented products like Old Spice’s Fiji and Axe’s Africa deodorants. The perfume is not an escape from Claude’s reality, but a gathering of her scent-based memories and heritage: her father’s cologne, the Haitian tropics, an evocation of her mother’s Vodou incense. This is especially important because being incarcerated (at the age of nineteen) for twenty-five years has attenuated Claude’s childhood memories. Tanaïs deploys olfaction’s powerful connections across space and time — its evocation of other places, other times, family inheritance, and even the cross-generational circum-Atlantic connections held in Voudun — to support these Black women living in the wake of the prison’s interruptions time, place, community, and sensory experience.

Together, these works by Giles, Trask, and Tanaïs delineate a mode of olfactory politics that goes beyond either the multiculturalism of the Old Spice Guy or the important interventions of the movement for fragrance-free spaces.³³ How can scent be leveraged to repair the atmospheric and sensory transformations — as well as the imposition of racial and colonial hierarchies — enacted through processes of deodorization? In addition to exposing the suppressed racial and colonial histories entangled with “deodorization,” how can we help produce smellscapes that sustain and empower Black and Indigenous communities? Should reparations for Indigenous dispossession and slavery extend beyond the (also vital) issues of financial or territorial redistribution to encompass the very air we breathe? By provoking questions such as these, Giles, Trask, and Tanaïs underscore the profound power — which encompasses understandings of history and geography, the insidious reinscription of racial and colonial hierarchies, material supports for individual and collective memory, and practices of healing and resurgence — materialized in everyday olfactory experiences.