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

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. 1598-1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial...