Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity by Carmen Nocentelli (review)

Around 1625, a factor of the English East India Company at Surat, John Leach-land, had a child with an Indian woman and—having refused to abandon her—was suspended from the Company service. Despite pressure from the Company officials, Leachland remained with his Indian wife until his death in 1332, “eking out precarious existence on the margins of the East India Company community” (2). Leachland’s half-English daughter, Mary, whose life and virtue seemingly remained a concern for the Surat community, was later allowed to marry an Englishman herself, in a desperate attempt to keep her from the allegedly corrupting influence of her Indian mother. This anecdote, which reveals a deep anxiety the East India Company officials had about sexual liaisons with the native population, opens Carmen Nocentelli’s study of the role interracial unions played in the European colonial imagination from the voyage of Magellan to the Anglo-Dutch War.

As Nocentelli states at the beginning of her work, Empires of Love analyzes how European colonial fascination with ‘India’—a name used for the vast territory “from the Gulf of Aden to the South China Sea” (4)—shaped European understanding of race and sexuality. In viewing both race and sexuality as two categories that emerged together and contributed to each other’s development, Nocentelli is adding to a recent wave of publications historicizing the two categories in different historical contexts and locations. The book’s focus on European exploration in Asia, however, is particularly fruitful, since it is during the exploration and colonization of this part of the globe European were faced with a spectrum of well-established cultural practices. These practices, viewed through the lens of licit and illicit sexuality, contributed to the “othering” of the local populations and—in time—formed the understanding of Oriental sexuality as illicit, unbalanced, and potentially destabilizing. Most importantly, this eroticized sexuality was both rooted in the racial difference of the Indian people, and helped to define this difference, when contrasted with healthy heterosexual practices of the Europeans.

The book consists of six chapters arranged in chronological order; each chapter deals with a particular stage in the development of the racial and sexual discourses and is informed by a particular literary text (or texts). Although these texts were written by the Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and English authors over the span of two centuries, Nocentelli argues that her use of these works does not “homogenize … tactics of race mixing … or lump together the results they produced” (11) but rather shows that the authors of these early modern ethnographic and literary works were drawing upon a shared understandings of Asian race and sexuality. Moreover, these tactics and approaches to race and gender were a product of “mimetic rivalries” (11) which shaped European expansion and contributed to a shared colonial discourse.

Nocentelli begins by examining European fascination with a peculiar practice of male genital implantation and modification, which emphasized simultaneously sexual and racial difference of the South-East Asian men. These practiced of genital modification were explained by citing illicit sexuality of local men; namely, genital implements were viewed as measures to either enhance sexual pleasure or to prevent sodomy. By contrast, as Nocentelli points out, female practices of genital modification, although noted in the sources, are passed over in virtual silence by the early modern authors. This disparity in portrayal, therefore, emphasizes “Indian” women as open to assimilation and promoted the connection between colonial conquest and interracial marriage. Chapter 2 continues this theme by focusing on the climactic episode on Luís Vaz de Camões’s epic poem Os Lusíadas. Devoted to Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, part of the poem describes the mariners visiting an island of nymphs, where erotic encounters between sailor and the island’s exclusively female population are followed by interracial marriages. In Nocentelli’s analysis of the passage, intermarrying between the Portuguese explorers and the nymphs corresponds to the...