Overview

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 damned-- Focusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer Tanais 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, Tanais 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 perfume--moving from base to heart to head notes--IN 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.

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9798200736157

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Reviews

Novelist and perfumer Tanais blends in this beautiful work memoir, history, and notes on perfuming to interrogate love, violence, and generational healing. Throughout, rich imagery and language are married as Tanais moves through their ancestral trauma to discover a place of healing...Readers will find more than just their olfactory senses heightened by this beautiful meditation. -- Publisher's Weekly

Novelist and perfumer Tanais blends in this beautiful work memoir, history, and notes on perfuming to interrogate love, violence, and generational healing. Throughout, rich imagery and language are married as Tanais moves through their ancestral trauma to discover a place of healing...Readers will find more than just their olfactory senses heightened by this beautiful meditation. -- Publishers Weekly

Author Information

TANAIS is a perfumer and author of the critically acclaimed novel Bright Lines, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They have written for Elle, VICE, New York Magazine, Literary Hub, Catapult and them. They are a graduate of Vassar College and Brooklyn College MFA, and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell Colony, the American India Foundation and Voices of Our Nations. Over the course of their career, they have worked as a community organizer, domestic violence court advocate, probation intake officer, and taught arts in New York City high schools. In 2014, they began studying perfumery, eventually starting a successful independent beauty and fragrance brand, the acclaimed Hi Wildflower. Recently, they launched a podcast and perfume anthology called MALA: Blooms & Bad Women. They live in Brooklyn. TANAIS is a perfumer and author of the critically acclaimed novel Bright Lines, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They have written for Elle, VICE, New York Magazine, Literary Hub, Catapult and them. They are a graduate of Vassar College and Brooklyn College MFA, and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell Colony, the American India Foundation and Voices of Our Nations. Over the course of their career, they have worked as a community organizer, domestic violence court advocate, probation intake officer, and taught arts in New York City high schools. In 2014, they began studying perfumery, eventually starting a successful independent beauty and fragrance brand, the acclaimed Hi Wildflower. Recently, they launched a podcast and perfume anthology called MALA: Blooms & Bad Women. They live in Brooklyn.

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