| In the late sixteenth-century a Peruvian Indian and Inca nobleman named Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote a one-thousand page history of the world, his Nueva Cronica y Buen Gobierno, recounting the development of Andean and European humanity from the beginning of time up to the period in which the author lived. My analysis focuses on the mode of communication used by Guaman Poma, his use of Renaissance Iberian discursive and visual codes, to articulate his radical views of Spanish rule in Peru. His views, I argue, although articulated in a foreign language and media, express a fundamentally Andean understanding of the world. The conquest and the Spanish people are woven into the Andean mythological order. Andean and Spanish worlds are made to conform to a common temporal and spatial model in the author's attempt to make sense of the apocalyptic consequences of the arrival the Spanish. |
