Indography: Writing the "Indian" in Early Modern England (Signs of Race)

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference. Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction....Pages 1-20 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 How to Make an Indian....Pages 23-42 Looking for Loss, Anticipating Absence....Pages 43-56 From First Encounter to “Fiery Oven”....Pages 57-70 Trafficking in Tangomóckomindge....Pages 71-83 Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages ....Pages 85-104 Playing Indian....Pages 105-115 Tobacco, Union, and the Indianized English....Pages 117-131 Sick Ethnography....Pages 133-147 Front Matter....Pages 149-149 Spenser’s “Men of Inde”....Pages 151-168 From Lunacy to Faith....Pages 169-181 “Enter Orlando with a Scarf Before His Face”....Pages 183-195 “Does this become you, Princess?”....Pages 197-207 Playing an Indian Queen....Pages 209-222 Made in India....Pages 223-234 “A Well-Born Race”....Pages 235-248 Afterword....Pages 249-255 Back Matter....Pages 257-271 Indography considers literary and non-literary representations of Indians in early modern English writing in relation to processes of globalization and race formation. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world, west and east, with them. Indography: Writing the 'Indian' in Early Modern England considers the ethnographic and racializing practices that were the hallmark of English global 'knowledges' post-Columbus. In a series of essays that tease out the affinities and discontinuities between the production of western and eastern 'Indians' in English travel writing, medical treatises, literature and drama, the volume's contributors show how early modern purveyors of Indography saw bodies and identities as translatable, susceptible not just to cross-cultural interpretation but also to protean movement and change