Select annotated bibliography entry
Ng, Su Fang. "Making Race in the Early Modern East Indies." New Literary History 52, no. 3 (2021): 509-33.
Examines early modern English and Malay accounts of cross-cultural encounters to consider racial formation in the Indian Ocean during the advent of European maritime expansion. The essay focuses on the epistemological encounter between Arabic physiognomy and European ideas about skin, the use of ethnic categories, and the emergence of “Malay” as a category. This scholarship is of interest to students of early modern studies, the Indian Ocean, Orientalism, and colonialism.