Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes

Name: Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes
Brand: University of Arizona Press
SKU: 9780816557226
Price: 4074.0 INR
Availability: InStock

by Laura Leon Llerena

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ISBN13: 9780816557226
Binding: Paperback
Subject: N/A
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publisher Imprint: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: June 16, 2026
Pages: 264
Original Price: USD 35.0
Language: English
Edition: N/A
Item Weight: 354 grams
BISAC Subject(s): Indigenous Studies

About The Book

Reading the Illegible examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochir� Manuscript (c. 1598-1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed "untranslatable in all the usual senses," but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility.

The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochir� Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers' technology of alphabetic writing.

Reading the Illegible weaves together the story of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochir� Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.

About The Author

Laura Leon Llerena is an assistant professor at Durham University (UK). Her research concentrates on the circulation of knowledge produced by and about Indigenous peoples from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

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