"In this wide-ranging, erudite, and accessible volume, Horodowich and Nagel teach us to see the world in a new way, or rather, in an old way that has long been forgotten. We are accustomed to thinking that Christopher Columbus mistakenly believed that he had reached Asia, but that other Europeans soon saw past his error. In Amerasia we discover that Columbus was not entirely wrong, and that a lot of people agreed with him - in a way - for a very long time. Europeans often thought of Mexico as a province of China, for example, or of China as a 'New World.' This 'Amerasian thinking' upends much of what we thought we knew about the literature and art of the early modern European encounter with the wider world." - Ricardo Padrón, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia "Seldom does a work of history force us to revisit an entire universe of evidence as if we had never seen it before. Amerasia powerfully refutes contemporary dismissals of early modern Europe's perception of the Americas as Asia as the history of an error. Instead, Horodowich and Nagel demonstrate that Europe's dialogue with the lands and peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa - solipsistic and violent as it was - produced rich intellectual and material cultures that obeyed coherent cosmological (and geographical) paradigms.

It was only through arduous rehearsal and gradual shift that this epistemology gave way to our own problematic modernity. This splendid work of scholarship will remain indispensable reading for anyone interested in the histories of early globalization, cartography, empire, and race, as well as in the histories of scientific revolutions and broader cultural upheavals." - Nicolás Wey Gómez, Professor of History, California Institute of Technology and author of The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed to the Indies . "Thoughtfully conceived and elegantly written, Amerasia takes readers into a dazzling journey across media, materials, representations, misunderstandings, and intuitions, to recuperate a world-imaginary where near and far, familiar and unknown, the distant past and the impending future enmesh together. The authors ingeniously piece together traces left behind by Europeans' process of self-orientation at the dawn of the colonialist enterprise and the codification of the Exotic and the Other. By unsettling conventional disciplinary boundaries, geographical coordinates, and clear-cut distinctions between imagination, knowledge, and experience, Ameresia is a cogent study that will certainly provoke discussion and will invite us to rethink old questions in new ways. " - Michele Matteini, Associate Professor of East Asian Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture, NYU.