Against the grain of much contemporary scholarship within medieval studies, this work emphasizes the radical alterity and historical rupture that the Middle Ages represents in European history.Through an engagement with three contentious debates in medieval studies – historiography, race and individuated subjectivity – Vanita Seth’s work employs postcolonial and postmodern theorizing to explore questions of ontology, epistemology, facial privileging, and emotion and identity in the...

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...

This anthology of essays, deliberates chiefly on the notion of locating home through the lens of the mythical idea of Trishanku, implying in-between space and homing, in diaspora women’s narratives, associated with the South Asian region. The idea of in-between space has been used differently in various cultures but gesture prominently on the connotation of ‘hanging’ between worlds. Historically, imperialism and the indentured/ ‘grimit’ system, triggered dispersal of labourers to the vario...