New World Postcolonial: The Political Thought of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

337 Pages·2018·2.029 MB·English

by  James W. Fuerst

NEW WORLD POSTCOLONIAL
ILLUMINATIONS:
Cultural Formations of the Americas Series
JOHN BEVERLEY AND SARA CASTRO-KLARÉN, EDITORS
NEW WORLD
POSTCOLONIAL
The Political Thought of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
JAMES W. FUERST
University of Pittsburgh Press
To a scattered dynasty of solitaries
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6540-4
Cover art: Nieuwe en “meest nauwkeurige” wereldkaart door Joan Blaeu
(New and “most accurate” world map, by J. Blaeu) 1664, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cover design by Jordan Wannemacher
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword by Sara Castro-Klarén ix
INTRODUCTION 1
1. BECOMING AN INCA: LIFE, WORKS,
AND CONTEXT 11
2. MESTIZO RHETORIC 40
3. THE MANY FACES OF VIRACOCHA AND
THE TURNING OF THE WORLD: TRAGEDY,
CONVERSION, REBIRTH 81
4. AUCA: TO KILL A TYRANT 118
5. “DIE A KING”: GONZALO PIZARRO’S
REBELLION 148
vI | CONTENTS
6. JESUIT AMAUTAS: PREJUDICE, PREACHING,
AND PEDAGOGY IN PERU 177
APPENDIX. “PROLOGUE TO THE INDIANS,
MESTIZOS, AND CREOLES OF THE KINGDOMS
AND PROVINCES OF THE GREAT AND MOST
RICH EMPIRE OF PERU, EL YNCA GARCILASSO
DE LA VEGA, YOUR BROTHER COMPATRIOT
AND FELLOW COUNTRYMAN, HEALTH AND
HAPPINESS” 214
Notes 225
Bibliography 287
Index 317
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
n preparing the earlier version of this text, I am deeply grateful for the
I
help and guidance of Richard Tuck, José Antonio Mazzotti, and Pratap
Mehta, Doris Sommer for first introducing me to Inca Garcilaso, the faculty,
students, and staff at the Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas in Cuzco where I
studied for a summer and the Foreign Languages and Area Studies Grant
from Harvard that enabled me to do so, Anthony Pagden and Jennifer Pitts
for their comments on some of my initial research, Sankar Muthu for kindly
securing me access to Bobst Library, and a Minority Dissertation Fellow-
ship from the Ford Foundation that generously funded my writing. As for
this version of the text, I owe a debt of gratitude to John Beverley and Sara
Castro-Klarén for selecting it for the Illuminations series, to Alcira Dueñas,
whose work on Andean intellectuals introduced me to Juan de Cuevas Herrera
and who then helped me obtain a copy of his manuscript from the Biblioteca
Real del Palacio de Madrid, and to the many Latin Americanists, Peruvian-
ists, colonialists, postcolonialists, and garcilacistas who have offered invalu-
able suggestions, encouragement, and support at various times over the years,
including Sharonah Fredrick, Christian Fernández, Walter Mignolo, John
Beverley, Margarita Zamora, José Antonio Mazzotti, Sara Castro-Klarén, and
vIII | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Rolena Adorno, among others. Finally, I would like to thank Josh Shanholtzer
and Alex Wolfe at University of Pittsburgh Press, the anonymous reviewer
whose insightful comments helped me to sharpen chapters 5 and 6, family
and friends for putting up with me, and Ellen V. Holloman for her undying
confidence that this work would one day make it into print.
FOREWORD
hus far the work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega has not been chiefly
T
interpreted as an intervention in political thought. Drawing from the
extensive bibliography on Inca Garcilaso in Spanish and the new and expand-
ing bibliography in English, James Fuerst navigates a series of hidden and
coded passages in the Royal Commentaries and its second part General History
of Peru in order to bring together a significant number of texts and questions
that enable him to sketch a map of Garcilaso’s political preoccupations as he
narrates the history of the Inca dynasty and the government that is to come
after the Spanish conquest of the Andean empire. Fuerst is not only attentive
to Garcilaso’s overt and implicit discussions of Renaissance political theory,
but he is particularly keen in locating and excavating any subterranean pres-
ence, allusion, or vibration of Andean political concepts and practices that
might illuminate Inca Garcilaso’s narration of political events and actions by
the various personages that populate the thousands of pages of his narrative.
Fuerst’s examination of the political thought of Inca Garcilaso is placed
in the grid of current imperial studies, and to some extent it is written in the
hope that imperial studies in English about the English invasion and set-
tlement of North America find in this study a call to consider the questions