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Europe's Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500-1900
Contributor(s): Seth, Vanita (Author)
ISBN: 0822347458     ISBN-13: 9780822347453
Publisher: Duke University Press
OUR PRICE:   $102.55  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: August 2010
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | Epistemology
- History | North American
- Philosophy | History & Surveys - Modern
Dewey: 970.018
LCCN: 2010004454
Series: Politics, History, and Culture
Physical Information: 312 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - Modern
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Europe's Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference--particularly racial difference--and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self-other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth's examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe's Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.