Autorentext

Amrita Sen is Associate Professor and Deputy Director, UGC-MMTTC, University of Calcutta, and affiliated faculty, Department of English. She has published extensively on early modern drama, East India Company women, Mughal collecting, and Indian Shakespeares.

Klappentext

Situating itself against the transitional moment of first direct contact of English merchants with the Indian subcontinent, this book examines what it might have meant to perform as Indian in distinct economic and political spaces in early modern England.

Turning to the years leading up to and following the establishment of the East India Company, it explores how the arrival of new material imports intersected with questions of racecraft and cultural appropriation on the English stage. It sheds new light on the cultural impact of the East Indies trade by examining late sixteenth and early seventeenth century drama including public theatres, court masques, and civic pageantry. This book views England's domestic and civic spaces as contact zones, where members of the monarchy or London companies performed as Indians in ritual or political drama. To perform India was to negotiate questions of racecraft, cosmopolitan, and new English gains in global commerce.

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Acknowledgements

Note on Transcription Practices

List of Illustrations

Introduction: "Here, Come from the farthest Steppe of India": East India Company, Racecraft and Domestic Transculturation in early modern England

Before the Company (1575-1599)

1. Imagining India before East India Company: The Queen's Majesty's Entertainment at Woodstock and New Cartographies of Exchange

2. Changelings, Bottom, and Transnational Exchange: Finding the Indian in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Early Company Years (1600-1642)

3. Blackness and Spices: East India Company and Problems of Exchange in Civic Spectacle

4. Playing an Indian Queen: Curiosity Cabinets, Ethnography, and The Temple of Love

5. Epilogue: The Avatar Franchise and the Ghosts of Indians Past

Bibliography

Index