Andrew Kettler
Andrew Kettler received his doctorate from the History Department at the University of South Carolina in May of 2017. Prior to entering the Graduate School at South Carolina, Andrew received his M.A. in History from the University of Nebraska-Omaha for his thesis, “The Deconstruction of European Odorphobia on the Sensory Border of the American Frontier.” He continues to research the use of olfactory language in the making of racial, class, and gendered metaphors. Andrew published some of these original findings in Senses and Society, the Journal of American Studies, in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, and in the edited collection Empire of the Senses. He has also published numerous book reviews, review essays, encyclopedia entries, has six articles currently under review, has current research essays published at the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Venti, and Patterns of Prejudice, and has circulated an additional research chapter within an edited collection on the Renaissance. During the 2016-2017 academic year, Andrew completed graduate research using funds provided from the Bilinski Educational Foundation. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he researched as a fellow at the University of Toronto, the Huntington Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. For the 2018-2019 academic year, Andrew also served as a short-term Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society. For the 2019-2020 academic year, Andrew served as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles as part of the 1619 anniversary series on the history of American slavery. In the summer of 2021, he also served as a fellow at Monticello. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World is published by Cambridge University Press and focuses on the importance of aromatic consciousness in the making of Atlantic era resistance to the olfactory discourses of state, religious, and slave masters. He is currently co-editing the Routledge History of the Senses, while researching three new book projects on “Cattle and Capitalism,” “Anti-Accelerationism,” and “A Global History of Sulfur."
Supervisors: Dr. Mark Smith, Dr. Matt Childs, Dr. Woody Holton, Dr. John Grigg, Dr. Daniel Littlefield, Dr. David Shields, and Dr. Sharla Fett
Supervisors: Dr. Mark Smith, Dr. Matt Childs, Dr. Woody Holton, Dr. John Grigg, Dr. Daniel Littlefield, Dr. David Shields, and Dr. Sharla Fett
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Background Information by Andrew Kettler
Monograph Sections by Andrew Kettler
spiritualism, slavery, and the sense of smell in the context of an African
child’s dreamworld. The tale summarizes the racial perspectives of a dark-skinned
slave boy named Tabou whose mother, who had also birthed
a free and light-skinned brother with her master, finds her son solemnly
eating peppered fish on the banks of a Hispaniola stream. The child tells
his mother that he feels increasingly distanced from his brethren, as many
diasporic tales explicate in binaries based on twins and/or siblings. Tabou
protests: “I’m so black, and I don’t like it a bit. I’d like to turn white like
my half-brother.” When asked why Tabou hates his blackness, he proclaims
because everyone knows “the blacker folks are, the stronger they
smell.”
history, Andrew Kettler uses smell as a frame of analysis for
constructions and perceptions of race and the environment in the age of
Atlantic slavery. Kettler recounts how proponents of slavery defined
African bodies as noxious and pungent and therefore inferior and
deserving of enslavement. African slaves were deemed “excremental” by
their owners, and, as such, vastly inferior to their masters and trapped in a
pre-modern state of being in whichmodern hygiene and other trappings of
enlightenment remained beyond their reach. By branding African bodies as
odoriferous, slave owners equated them with animals or beasts of burden:
well-equipped for hard labor. Kettler vividly and effectively shows how the
sense of smell was used to aesthetically define specific populations as
lacking the necessary humanity to become full subjects, and in so doing
demonstrates that the roots of racism transgressed intellectual and political
arenas and included the realm of the senses.
Articles and Chapters by Andrew Kettler
in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between
Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d’en
Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics
and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North
American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a
forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual
literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.
1800 worked consistently in libraries, herbariums, and visional gardens while
using a deodorized scientific methodology that found the vernacular and Native
American influences distasteful and increasingly useless, English colonial
botanists, both amateur and professional, analyzed plants in their frontier environment
with all of their sense organs, especially the nose.
embodied sensations deem ecological hazards. This may seem a simple
categorization regarding human choice to participate in environmental activism.
However, as energy conglomerates work to hide their malfeasance, modern
selves rarely experience environmental decline through the five senses. The
distances between the modern self and ecological hazards, both physical and
discursive, emerge because the superstructure develops defense mechanisms that
protect polluters. Encountering sulfur in the English environment, prior to the
Industrial Revolution, consistently meant that evil was moving within the
preternatural realm. The external sensing of evil through the sensory signatures
of sulfur was a form of sense work within the phenomenological space between
the supernatural and the natural. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the idea
that sensing sulfur signified evil or malevolence faded. Because coal and her
sulfuric sensory traits became vital to the establishment of the Industrial
Revolution, embodied changes were forced to occur, essentially through the
creation of a false sensory consciousness that defined sulfuric sensations as
positive markers of progress, profit, and purity. Upon the frontiers of the
commonwealth and the newly established United States, these sensations
persisted. The early frontiers of North America offer historical spaces where
individuals marched westward and educated their senses to discover profit.
Sulfuric connotations of evil were rarely considered, as frontiersmen educated
their senses beneath a superstructure that defined associations with sulfur as
preternaturally safe. Sensory skills were negotiated and educated to catch coal
and sulfur through greater and more refined tactile, nasal, flavorful, visual, and
aural skills. These sensory pedagogies inhabited somatic work farther west into
British Columbia, known for explosive environmental conditions due to large
coal supplies, indigenous populations, sacred alimentary goods, and amazing
natural beauty. How citizens decide to become activated to environmental
concern, as within modern Vancouver and her sulfur mounds, arises through
whether the socially constructed senses ever perceive pollution as corruptive.
Image 369 [371] of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) depicts an encounter between a member of the Andean Inka community and a representative of the Spanish colonial effort. “Cay coritacho micunqui?” the Andean asks. “Is this the gold you eat,” referring to Iberian greed and persistent efforts to extract precious metals from indigenous land. Though the Spaniards did not, in fact, eat gold, the implicit ubiquitousness of colonial extractivism presents a crucial factor in understanding how these different groups perceived one another in initial moments of contact—and particularly, one might argue, through the senses. As Andrew Kettler argues, for Spanish colonists these perceptions often involved a sensorial process of demonization and dehumanization that justified imperial abuse as well as capitalism. Atmospheric miasmas of sulfur in the New World, West Africa, and East Asia consequently signaled hell to many travelers struggling through new encounters on troubled seas and within strange lands. And as the metropoles of London, Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris increasingly denoted sulfuric aroma to ideas of profit, hygiene, fumigation, gunpowder, and industry, the colonized periphery was purported to emit the devil’s sensory significations. Observing how instances of European capitalist violence merge with religious perceptions of evil and sulfuric atmospheres in the so-called New World, Kettler offers that a synesthetic sensorium is crucial to understanding how capitalism was tested through colonial practices to become prophetically axiomatic, building discursive otherings that rationalize the continued existence of increasingly abusive systems.
https://www.venti-journal.com/andrew-kettler
spiritualism, slavery, and the sense of smell in the context of an African
child’s dreamworld. The tale summarizes the racial perspectives of a dark-skinned
slave boy named Tabou whose mother, who had also birthed
a free and light-skinned brother with her master, finds her son solemnly
eating peppered fish on the banks of a Hispaniola stream. The child tells
his mother that he feels increasingly distanced from his brethren, as many
diasporic tales explicate in binaries based on twins and/or siblings. Tabou
protests: “I’m so black, and I don’t like it a bit. I’d like to turn white like
my half-brother.” When asked why Tabou hates his blackness, he proclaims
because everyone knows “the blacker folks are, the stronger they
smell.”
history, Andrew Kettler uses smell as a frame of analysis for
constructions and perceptions of race and the environment in the age of
Atlantic slavery. Kettler recounts how proponents of slavery defined
African bodies as noxious and pungent and therefore inferior and
deserving of enslavement. African slaves were deemed “excremental” by
their owners, and, as such, vastly inferior to their masters and trapped in a
pre-modern state of being in whichmodern hygiene and other trappings of
enlightenment remained beyond their reach. By branding African bodies as
odoriferous, slave owners equated them with animals or beasts of burden:
well-equipped for hard labor. Kettler vividly and effectively shows how the
sense of smell was used to aesthetically define specific populations as
lacking the necessary humanity to become full subjects, and in so doing
demonstrates that the roots of racism transgressed intellectual and political
arenas and included the realm of the senses.
in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between
Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d’en
Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics
and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North
American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a
forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual
literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.
1800 worked consistently in libraries, herbariums, and visional gardens while
using a deodorized scientific methodology that found the vernacular and Native
American influences distasteful and increasingly useless, English colonial
botanists, both amateur and professional, analyzed plants in their frontier environment
with all of their sense organs, especially the nose.
embodied sensations deem ecological hazards. This may seem a simple
categorization regarding human choice to participate in environmental activism.
However, as energy conglomerates work to hide their malfeasance, modern
selves rarely experience environmental decline through the five senses. The
distances between the modern self and ecological hazards, both physical and
discursive, emerge because the superstructure develops defense mechanisms that
protect polluters. Encountering sulfur in the English environment, prior to the
Industrial Revolution, consistently meant that evil was moving within the
preternatural realm. The external sensing of evil through the sensory signatures
of sulfur was a form of sense work within the phenomenological space between
the supernatural and the natural. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the idea
that sensing sulfur signified evil or malevolence faded. Because coal and her
sulfuric sensory traits became vital to the establishment of the Industrial
Revolution, embodied changes were forced to occur, essentially through the
creation of a false sensory consciousness that defined sulfuric sensations as
positive markers of progress, profit, and purity. Upon the frontiers of the
commonwealth and the newly established United States, these sensations
persisted. The early frontiers of North America offer historical spaces where
individuals marched westward and educated their senses to discover profit.
Sulfuric connotations of evil were rarely considered, as frontiersmen educated
their senses beneath a superstructure that defined associations with sulfur as
preternaturally safe. Sensory skills were negotiated and educated to catch coal
and sulfur through greater and more refined tactile, nasal, flavorful, visual, and
aural skills. These sensory pedagogies inhabited somatic work farther west into
British Columbia, known for explosive environmental conditions due to large
coal supplies, indigenous populations, sacred alimentary goods, and amazing
natural beauty. How citizens decide to become activated to environmental
concern, as within modern Vancouver and her sulfur mounds, arises through
whether the socially constructed senses ever perceive pollution as corruptive.
Image 369 [371] of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) depicts an encounter between a member of the Andean Inka community and a representative of the Spanish colonial effort. “Cay coritacho micunqui?” the Andean asks. “Is this the gold you eat,” referring to Iberian greed and persistent efforts to extract precious metals from indigenous land. Though the Spaniards did not, in fact, eat gold, the implicit ubiquitousness of colonial extractivism presents a crucial factor in understanding how these different groups perceived one another in initial moments of contact—and particularly, one might argue, through the senses. As Andrew Kettler argues, for Spanish colonists these perceptions often involved a sensorial process of demonization and dehumanization that justified imperial abuse as well as capitalism. Atmospheric miasmas of sulfur in the New World, West Africa, and East Asia consequently signaled hell to many travelers struggling through new encounters on troubled seas and within strange lands. And as the metropoles of London, Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris increasingly denoted sulfuric aroma to ideas of profit, hygiene, fumigation, gunpowder, and industry, the colonized periphery was purported to emit the devil’s sensory significations. Observing how instances of European capitalist violence merge with religious perceptions of evil and sulfuric atmospheres in the so-called New World, Kettler offers that a synesthetic sensorium is crucial to understanding how capitalism was tested through colonial practices to become prophetically axiomatic, building discursive otherings that rationalize the continued existence of increasingly abusive systems.
https://www.venti-journal.com/andrew-kettler
numerous pioneering routes for scholarly understandings of a new form
of accessible media for historical study. That graphic impetus in
academic circles of the early twenty-first century accelerated during the
last few years into the undergraduate classroom. Graphic histories,
historically focused graphic nonfiction, have specifically entered a
considerable space within academic publishing markets to offer
interdisciplinary narratives for broad and developing audiences.
signifier has not been misplaced by the irrational rapidity and perpetual
neurosis of the Trumpian news cycle. Because Charlottesville, like Ferguson and
Cleveland, like Charleston and Baltimore, should be consistently evoked, so as
not to be pushed aside by the constant drudgery of living under a rhetorically
manipulative demagogue and his fatuous proclamations of Heritage, History,
and the Rule of Law. I therefore also write against the causes of Charlottesville,
the alt-right white nationalism that was born of internet misogyny and
irrational fears of globalization. This review essay is not objective, as it stems
from a place rational enough to understand that objectivity can never be
neutral, especially in a time when protecting the memory of the treasonous
Confederacy has become a legitimate and romanticized discourse for covetous
American politicians.
South Atlantic starts with a reading of the Atlantic Charter
(1941) as another document within a long line of political
totems that jettisoned the role of the South Atlantic
from modern world history. By further consolidating
North Atlantic hegemony, the Atlantic Charter was initially
critiqued as anticolonial from leaders like Mahatma
Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Regardless of these assessments,
which were articulated by postcolonial forces to
even greater emphasis at Bandung in 1955, the Atlantic
Charter became the model for NATO and the basis for neoliberal
governance during the Cold War. Starting with
postcolonial discursive resistance to the Atlantic Charter,
deemed a triumph of modern transnational liberalism,
sets this edition at the crossroads of an important
current debate, which asserts a multivalent hegemony of
capitalism, whiteness, and nationalism consistently suppresses
knowledges from spaces and peoples deemed distant
from the North Atlantic.
economy.
Animals at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. The forum offered a delightful
representation of the internal workings of a social movement that has the
emotionality and aptitude to create considerable change, but still faces both
substantial internal discord and aggressive external resistance that prevents
serious influence within the public sphere. The Sociology Department at Brock
offers some of the leading voices for Animal Studies, and provided their
symposium as an activist space for scholars to voice philosophical concerns with
the pace of Animal Liberation and as a book launch for two new editions that
summarize the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). This review essay offers
attention to those two editions, a multi-volume activist project from David
Nibert and Sue Coe and a single volume academic edition collected by Atsuko
Matsuoka and John Sorenson. These publications, and the debates that were
offered at Thinking about Animals, suggest that CAS is at an electrifying but
troublesome crisis point. Like many social movements that offer activist
scholarship for public consumption, CAS must avoid floundering in onanistic
tendencies.
Companion to the Dutch Golden Age investigates historiographical
topics related to Dutch populations, warfare,
politics, economics, religions, the arts, and education.
The time line accessed to understand these topics
during the Dutch Golden Age proceeds from the rise
of the United Provinces after the Union of Utrecht in
1579 through the religious debates at the Synod of Dort
in 1618-19 into the Enlightenment, culminating at the
Peace of Rijswijk with France in 1697.
meaning” to Foucauldian power analyses to
demonstrate the social construction of the senses
through both horizontal relationships based in cultural learning and vertical associations based on social shaming and
material motives.
offers an entertaining and vibrant history of political relationships
throughout the Royal Navy during the era of the French Revolution,
the Haitian Rebellion, and within numerous instances of resistance
rising from common sailors. Davey’s work adds to a considerably
important historiography including Peter Linebaugh and Marcus
Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the
Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000) through attending to
a deeper archival search into diverse political identities of sailors in the
contested Atlantic World. Thinking much about class relationships,
and how sailors understood their place in the multivalent Age of
Revolutions, Davey’s work should be read by Atlantic historians of
empire, as well as a broader audience interested in stirring naval
histories.
the British Transatlantic Slave Trade adds a rich chronology to previous
scholarship on links between African knowledge, natural history, and
the art of collecting related to slave voyages in the Atlantic world. Following a field of study initiated by Neil Safier, James Delbourgo, and Londa Schiebinger, Murphy looks at African and Indigenous agency concerning the creation of natural history and ecological knowledge. Captivity’s Collections specifically explores the racialized contexts of
modern environmental study through analyzing on-the-ground knowledge
acquisitions in New Spain and the west coast of Africa.
Civil War is a fascinating little book that will find its way into numerous classrooms due to its highly accessible use of microhistory to understand many significant cultural and political trends in the nineteenth-century United States. The work specifically focuses on a history of gender through the telling of a stage performance in Cincinnati in 1856. Thinking about con men and spectacles in the Queen City through the lens of reception, racism, and entertainment, Michael D. Pierson provides an engaging history with numerous tentacular connections to major narratives concerning the North and the South in the late antebellum era.
American consciousness related to defending the Constitution. Finished in the wake of the attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the work was begun much before that fateful day for understanding American respect for specific institutions against party affiliations and the cult of personality of Donald Trump. Looking at major political movements in American history, especially opposition movements that used the Constitution to defend unpopular ideologies, Jared Goldstein shows how the supreme law of the nation has functioned as political ammunition due to both forceful manipulation of political rhetoric and the very malleability of the original document. Goldstein specifically questions what it means in American history to “fight like hell” for the Constitution, and what populations have been able to shape that assertion for nefarious means.
questions related to technological changes and alterations to the meaning of free speech. Exploring vital Supreme Court cases that faced questions of free speech and diverse forms of media, Jennifer Petersen sheds light on modern issues of digital media surrounding Artificial General Intelligence. Thinking often about the difference between crowds and publics, as well as issues of uncanny influence and social contagion, How Machines Came to Speak discusses questions about the First Amendment and aspects of constitutional interpretation that altered consistently over time and currently exist through much different forms that what originalism might generally afford.