Book Review

Comparative/World

In this significant work, Joan-Pau Rubiés takes us back to the European Renaissance and poses questions that have become alarmingly and urgently relevant again at the outset of the twenty-first century. In reflecting on why Europeans in Asia saw what they saw—how they perceived and interpreted human cultural diversity—Rubiés successfully argues that "the rationalist transformation of European culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be explained without the structuring agency of the discourses of travel literature, in all their moral and empirical diversity" (p. 398). Contrary to the book's subtitle, and as Rubiés himself admits, his study is less about southern India than about the European Renaissance from a new perspective, "emphasizing the growth of an analytical discourse about human diversity" (p. x). What makes the book at once unusual and important is Rubiés's inclusion of non-European discourses on travel, thereby offering the reader a truly comparatist frame. Consequently, at the core of Rubiés's study is his discontent with the notion that European engagement with the "other" or the geographical non-West was merely hegemonic. Rubiés discards the notion that Europeans travelers were universally voyeuristic and tended to reduce Indians to a purely passive state of being observed.

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Rubiés calls his own study a "history of language-games." Unusual as the term is, it proved very useful for this reader, since it accomplished precisely what Rubiés had set out to do: namely, to make wider and more focused the scope of a history of culture or a history of mentalities (p. xiv). In talking about "language-games," he achieves a much more differentiated understanding of travel, seeing it as a complex negotiation of images, whether prejudicial or unfettered by preconceptions.

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