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Diffuse Connections: Making Sense Of Smell In Canadian Diasporic Women's Writing, Stephanie Oliver

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the crucial, yet often unacknowledged, role smell plays in Canadian diasporic women’s writing. While some critics discuss scent in their work on taste, memory, and diasporic nostalgia, I argue for considering scent in its specificity and suggest that smell shapes diasporic subjectivities differently than taste. Complicating frameworks that focus primarily on notions of memory, homeland, and nostalgia, I consider how diasporic subjectivities are shaped by a range of feelings connected to experiences in past homelands and present places of habitation, including racialized and gendered forms of olfactory discrimination in the ostensibly tolerant nation of Canada. Appropriating the …