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.

Europe's Indians, Indians in Europe is an accessible and multidisciplinary synopsis of European iconographies and cultural narratives related to Native Americans. In this pioneering work, European fascination with and phantasmagorias of 'Indianness' are comprehensively discussed, involving perspectives of history, literature, and cultural criticism. Topics range from so-called Pocahontas, paraded as an exotic souvenir princess in front of seventeenth-century Londoners, to Native Americans touring Europe as show token Indians with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in the late nineteenth-century. European strategies of playing Indian include German dime novel artisan Karl May (1842-1912) and his literary fabrications of the 'vanishing race, ' which were utilized by National Socialist propaganda, as well as the Englishman Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (1888-1938) reinventing himself as Grey Owl, or contemporary Europeans, 'cloning' surrogate Indian identities and 'patenting' synthetic tribes. Covering a vast transatlantic spectrum of aspects and anecdotes, Europe's Indians, Indians in Europe is a seminal study for anyone interested in learning more about European motives, mythopoetics, and microcosms of 'dressing in feathers.'

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies), course: Native American Literature, language: English, abstract: INTRODUCTION Karen Louise Erdrich, born in Minnesota in 1954 as the eldest of seven children, was raised Catholic in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School. Her fiction reflects facets of her mixed heritage: she is German-American by her father, as well as French and Ojibwa (also known as Chippewa or Anishinaabe) by her mother. Louise Erdrich left North Dakota in 1972 and entered Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she met Michael Dorris, a mixed-blood Modoc Indian writer who founded the Native American Studies department at the college. Collaboratively, they published "Route Two" (1990) and "The Crown of Columbus" (1991). Erdrich and Dorris married in 1981, but were in the midst of divorce proceedings when he committed suicide in 1997. "I knew that Michael was suicidal from the second year of our marriage," Erdrich said in an interview. The award-winning writer is considered to be one of the most significant Native American novelists from the "second wave" of what is called the Native American Renaissance (see chapter 1.2). She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. "No one knew yet how many were lost, people kept no track." (Tracks, p. 15) "Tracks" (1988) Erdrich's novel Tracks, which is to be explored in the present argument, is the third part of an initially planned tetralogy, including "Love Medicine" (1984), "The Beet Queen" (1986), and "The Bingo Palace" (1994). Louise Erdrich created a novel cycle, exploring the lives of various generations of Chippewa family who live on a fictional reservation in North Dakota in the twentieth century, a time when Indian tribes were struggling to retain their remaining land. Chronologically speaking, it is the family's