How Guamán Poma was able to become conversant with the entire discursive complex of the conquest–cum–evangelization and redeploy it to critique the conquest and colonial rule, as well as offer a plan for good government, is a feat that remains unequaled in the history of colonial or modern letters. Compared with Garcilaso, his disadvantages were greater and his subalternity was extreme. He managed to learn doctrine by attending sermons, law by frequenting the courts, drawing by apprenticing himself to various churchmen and artists. Adorno also traces Guamán Poma’s ecclesiastical rhetoric to written sources that he quotes in his letter. He seems to have been thoroughly familiar, for instance, with Fray Luis de Granada’s sermon Memorial de la vida cristiana which was printed and widely circulated in the New World for evangelizing purposes (Adorno, 1986: 57). The new catechisms and sermonarios printed in Lima after the meeting of the Third Council of Lima allow Guamán Poma a firmer grasp of the problems that preaching Christianity to the Andean people entail. These texts help him sharpen his “pose as a preacher” (Adorno, 1986: 57). No less important are the confession manuals circulating in the Andes, for they offer a model to Guamán Poma for eliciting information and even for inventing the scene in which he instructs the king. Adorno writes that “Guamán Poma’s defense of his race is a direct reaction to the biases expressed in [the] doctrinal texts” (66), texts circulating in the Andes at the time of the Third Council in which the intellectual potential of Andeans is denigrated by none other than Acosta.
There is no doubt that Guamán Poma was also keenly aware of Las Casas’s position regarding the problematic justification for imperial rule and the natural intelligence and ethics of Indian societies. Like Garcilaso and Las Casas, he had no choice but to seek refuge under the umbrella of providential history and thus accept the king’s legitimate authority to govern. This move left open the possibility of demanding good government.
In conclusion, if, as it has been argued by Mendizabal, Botherston, and Brokaw, Guamán Poma worked from the cognitive order of the khipu, from the Andean ontology of numbers and the art of rectification (Brokaw, 2002: 293), perhaps we could say – as with the Cuzco school of painting – that we are confronting something new – modern – in the history of the world inaugurated by the year 1492. Perhaps we could suggest that it is the Andean structure of knowledge that allows him to dismantle European discourses, locate the fragile seems that hold the parts together, break the fragments, and reassemble them into new series with new semiotic relations, as he does in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Perhaps we could say that in a perverse way, the urgent need to respond to the destructuration of the self–world, the vital impulse to retreat from agony, allowed Garcilaso and Guamán Poma – from their respective subaltern subject positions – to hone the subject position and discursive perspective that would allow them to redefine the polemic for the postcolonial world.
References and Further Reading
1 oAdorno, Rolena (1986). Guarnán Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press.
2 Brading, David A. (1991). The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3 Brokaw, Galen (2002). “Khipu numeracy and alphabetic literacy in the Andes: Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s Nueva córonica y buen gobierno,” Colonial Latin American Review, 11(2): 275–303.
4 Castro, Daniel (2007). Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
5 Castro–Klaren, Sara (1999). “Mimicry revisited: Latin America, post–colonial theory and the location of knowledge.” In Alfonso de Toro and Fernando de Toro (eds), El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamerica, pp. 137–64. Madrid: Vervuert Iberoamericana.
6 ——— (2001). “Historiography on the ground: the Toledo Circle and Guamán Poma.” In Ileana Rodríguez (ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, pp. 143–71. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
7 Cervantes, Fernando (1994). The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
8 Cummins, Tom (1998). “Let me see! Reading is for them: colonial Andean images and objects ‘Como es costumbre tener los caciques Señores.’” In H. Boone and T. Cummins (eds), Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, pp. 91–148. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
9 Durand, José (1953). “La biblioteca del Inca,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 2: 239–64.
10 Fernández, Christian (2004). Inca Garcilaso: Imaginación, memoria e identidad. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
11 Hemming, John (1970). The Conquest of the Incas. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
12 Hulme, Peter (1986). Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797. London: Routledge.
13 Mazzotti, José Antonio (1996). Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: Resonancias andinas. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
14 Mignolo, Walter (1982). “Cartas, crónicas y relaciones del descubrimiento y la conquista.” In Iñigo Madrigal (ed.), Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana: Época colonial, pp. 57–116. Madrid: Cátedra.
15 Pagden, Anthony (1982). The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
16 Pease, Franklin (1978). Del Tahuantinsuyo a la historia del Perú. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
17 Porras Barrenechea, Raúl (1986). Los cronistas del Perú (1528–1530). Lima: Ediciones Centenario/ Banco de Crédito.
18 Rostoworowski, María (1983). Estructuras andinas del poder: Ideología religiosa y política. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
19 Seed, Patricia (1995). Ceremonies of Possessions in Europe’s Conquest of The New World 1492–1640. New York: Cambridge University Press.
20 Varner, John Grier (1968). El Inca: Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega. Austin: University of Texas Press.
21 Zamora, Margarita (1988). Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales de los Incas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7 7 Court Culture, Ritual, Satire, and Music in Colonial Brazil and Spanish America
Lúcia Helena Costigan
Owing to the fact that, unlike the Spanish American colonies, such as New Spain, Peru, and New Granada, Brazil did not have viceroys, printing presses, and universities during its first centuries, court culture took a long time to flourish in the Portuguese America. However, despite the absence of a court culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literary expressions related to Brazil emerged in Portugal right after Pedro Álvares Cabral accidentally landed in the newly “discovered” lands. Carta do achamento do Brasil, the letter written by Pero Vaz de Caminha (ca. 1450–1501) in 1500 and first published in 1817, is often considered the birth certificate of Brazilian letters. After this, most of the literature produced in Brazil during the