Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Three Ways to Be Alien

Three Ways to Be Alien examines the “friction and discomfort, at both the existential and the conceptual levels” (p. 173), that the early modern broadening of horizons engendered. Covering an impressive geographical area and chronological span, from the Western Mediterranean to India, from the 1530s to the 1720s, it draws on a vast range of sources—letters, contracts, diplomatic records, testaments, personal chronicles—to tell the stories (always in the plural) of identities caught between cultures. Sanjay Subrahmanyam contends that the individuals who inhabited the early modern world did not make a quick and smooth transition from being “inhabitants of Bijapur, Sussex, or Venice, to being cosmopolitans, and thus citizens of the world” (p. 173). Rather, they ended up feeling displaced and confused; as one of them aptly put it, “The Moors say I am a Christian, and the Christians say I am a Moor, and so I hang in balance without knowing what I should do with myself” (p. 1). The encounters examined in this book bespeak anxiety, puzzlement, and antagonism; while they may not (yet) have had the trappings of “full-blown Orientalism,” they are also far from exemplifying “a situation of mutual understanding” (p. 138).

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