Unmaking History: Seth’s Europe’s Indians

“To suggest that history can be unmade” (17) might be a light undertaking were it really just a suggestion. In Vanita Seth’s exciting work of comparative political theory, the suggestion is not merely made but shown to be a real possibility given her meticulous, complex, and perceptive reading of the production of racial difference over roughly four hundred years of European thought. As Seth’s work reminds us time and again, some of the most important reconstructions of the history of race thinking have inadvertently reproduced a theory of knowledge and history whereby the inevitability of the present seems manifest. How to undo the race thinking of the present becomes, for Seth, a project of undoing our categories of knowledge and history as well. While the undoing of our thinking is clearly the subtext and promise of the work, the explicit aim is to ask “To what extent was knowledge constituted within the epistemic particularity of European history born out of, and informed by, Europe’s relationship with a world outside its borders?” (11).

Organized more or less chronologically, the first chapter takes on the Renaissance. Titled “Self and Similitude, Renaissance Representations of the New World,” the chapter brings Seth’s distinctive view into sharp focus by pointing out that Europe’s encounters with the New World should be located within the episteme of Renaissance knowledge in general to evaluate the narrative that Europe was defined in opposition to its now conspicuously racialized “other” from the beginning. Instead, for Seth it is crucial to remember that “Renaissance knowledge formation was not articulated through oppositional narratives, but was governed by the logic of similitude” (14). Here her careful engagement with and affectionate departure from both postcolonial scholarship and what can loosely be termed the canon of social construction of knowledge becomes understandable as she explains that “it is from the vantage point of colonial history, a history that has in part been mediated through the grid of self-other, that we transpose our (modern) reading onto ancient texts” (23). Our modern understandings of self-other cannot be found in that form in Renaissance knowledge.

The detail that the New World did not immediately produce the widespread interest of the European public is taken very seriously in this chapter, and Seth’s privileging of this fact is put to effective use in articulating how and why similitude functions differently than, well, difference. The savage—as observed in the New World by colonizing Europeans yet to fully identify as European—was eventually made familiar before made different because “the vast repository of medieval monsters, pagan practices, cannibal feasts, and Golden Age innocence offered a self-referential medium between the new continent and the Christian canons, indigenous cultures, and ancient commentaries” (58). Moreover, the self-other frame not only articulates a relationship to the New World “other” that is more thoroughly modern than Renaissance knowledge allows, it also articulates a “self”—Europe—that had not yet replaced “Christendom” as an organizing identity.

The “discovery” of New World peoples was made meaningful by reference to ancient written texts containing mythical figures who were, from the not-yet European perspective, known to exist. The discovery of the New World merely confirmed what was already known in the ancient texts, and so did not initially (or necessarily) entail a radical otherizing of the peoples “discovered.” The logic of assimilation, carefully articulated by social construction of knowledge scholars as the episteme of the Renaissance, means candidly that “The fact of America did not lead to a revision of the facts” (45). But why would a political theorist emphasize this? Because, as Seth makes clear, the mistaken projection of the self-other frame to the sixteenth century de-historicizes knowledge and “requires colluding uncritically with the narrative of modernity: that the past is merely a prelude to, and a veiled promise of, the present” (59). The emergence of a “confident, self-conscious, self-defining” European identity is traced to the...