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
HuarochirÍ Manuscript (c. 15981608), 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
HuarochirÍ Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andeanauthored 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
HuarochirÍ Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the
European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a
multimedia society.
Drawing our attention to the central question of legibility as a means of
understanding the complex processes of reading and writing across
disparate record-keeping systems, this meticulously researched study of
the production and reception of the Huarochirí Manuscript opens new
paths for understanding how Native knowledge became inscribed in
European letters. Grounded in careful archival research, Leon Llerenas
magnificent study of textual production is rigorously represented in its
sociopolitical context. Amber Brian, author of Alva Ixtlilxochitls
Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial
Mexico
About Author/s
Laura Leon Llerena is an associate 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. She has published on translation and colonization of Indigenous
languages, on the coexistence of Indigenous and European media, and on
how material culture and notions of the sacred redefined social and
cultural interactions. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, Volkswagen Stiftung, and John Carter Brown Library
