In Sensory experiments; Psychophysics, Race, and the
Aesthetics of feeling, Erica Fretwell employs the science of
psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation in order to shed
light to the cultural landscape of affect in the United States during
the nineteenth century. She touches upon the concerns of scholars of
American literary studies in terms of affect and feeling and also with
their entanglement with histories of racialization. Fretwell critically
engages with the disciplines of post-humanism, aesthetics, affect
theory and new materialism. She employs in her analysis different
medical case studies, music, perfumes and recipes in order to
highlight how our five senses turned into indispensable elements of
pointing out human difference along the continuum of race, gender
and ability. Sensory experiments consists of five chapters, each of
which deals with one of our five senses and also by short intervals
on the synthesis of different senses. The structuring of the narrative
is innovative as different literary genres are employed to subvert the
nineteenth century hierarchy of senses.