ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Michael Neill's interest in geographical, affective and physiological dislocation in readings of three early modern travel narratives— Pietro della Valle's 'Travels. Early modern European travelers" encounters with torrid Indian climates and diseases made them partially aware of how their bodies were not unchanging, singular entities, but protean nodes in equally protean thermodynamic ecosystems. This awareness was managed, and even effaced, by assertions of embodied racial difference that nonetheless could not quite contain the indeterininacies of Sickening India. The chapter examines the economy of explosive enjoyment that is more fully recuperated for a narrative of racial difference. Sickening India entails a complex knot of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call molar identity and molecular becoming—or what Michael Neill might call, with more accuracy, location and dislocation. "Location" would characterize the frequently narrated histories of colonialism and empire in India that ultimately produced taxonomies of absolute racial difference between European and non-European.
