A very welcome addition to the field of colonial Latin American literary studies, Laura Leon Llerena’s forthcoming book, Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes (University of Arizona Press, 2023), is one of the many books we have indexed this year at Southwest Humanities. Leon Llerena’s study “examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru” using the concept of illegibility as a central theoretical theme, “which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media.” Reading the Illegible pays particular attention to the Haurochirí Manuscript, “the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period,” using the concepts of legibility and illegibility “to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism.” Leon Llerena’s book “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.” You can find more information about this exciting new work at the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 