World Making, Political Thought, and Indigenous Resurgence: Guaman Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega Inca

In the early modern period world making inspired debates about uncertainty, the circulation and limitations of knowledge, and the problem of government. For Garcilaso de la Vega Inca, the author of Royal Commentaries of the Inca (1606) and General History of Peru (1617), the making of the colonial world, meant interpreting and rendering a pre-conquest Inca society into the utopian possibility of a new colonial polity led by a mestizo elite. For Guaman Poma de Ayala, the author of New Chronicle and Good Government (1615), thinking about how governing happens and it is thought, meant distilling Quechua cosmology, ethics, and institutions into political praxis. They also ask us to ponder commonwealths already actualized and new political horizons asking to be realized. Both thinkers invite us to learn from political economies guided by the principle of Sumak Kawsay or living/knowing (Kawsay) in plenitude and harmony (Sumak). They also ask us to ponder commonwealths already actualized and new political horizons asking to be realized. Finally both provide us with two decolonial political treatises grounded in the necessary reverting and rewriting the starting origins of history: no longer Greece but the memories of Andean ways of thinking and praxis of living.

Organized by Department of Romance Studies and Center for Global Studies and the Humanities
Sponsored by Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies