| Summary: | This review article draws attention to two recent publications with a potential to revive the debate around the origins of Orientalism, Ângela Xavier and Ines Zupanov’s Catholic Orientalism (2015) and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Europe’s India (2017). Both books set out to respond to Said from a distance, by exploring stories of pre-British imperial knowledge making in Asia. Whilst the focus in Catholic Orientalism is on Portuguese (and some Italian, Spanish and French) materials, Europe’s India casts its net more widely also to include British writings. Both books attempt to create some clarity in a field particularly fraught with confusion, especially when it comes to representations of India’s religions. The most promising aspects to take note of are the appearance of new primary materials especially in Portugal, and the increasing intertwinement of European biographies with Asian societal and cultural processes.
|
|---|
