Bordering the imagination, or reading into the center of Guaman Poma’s drawings

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Biographical note

Jeremy James George is an independent scholar and art historian who writes on the art and architecture of pre-Hispanic Inca culture, contact and conquest, Latin American colonial-era cultural transformation, and contemporary adaptations of past visualities. He is the co-author (with Ananda Cohen Suarez) of Handbook to life in the Inca world (2011). Previously, he has taught at the City College of New York, Baruch College, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and he has lectured and presented papers on Inca art and architecture at such venues as Parsons School of Design, the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Northeast Conference on Andean and Amazonian Archaeology.

Notes

1 Although ‘author’ is a highly contentious classification in the early modern period, far different from today’s understanding of a holder of intellectual property or a creative producer and more so a construct of states, princes, or churches, I use it here combined with ‘artist’ because the joint term strikes me as accurate and familiar, though a bit unwieldy. I will, however, revert to ‘author’ upon subsequent usage for simplicity’s sake.

2 For a general cartographic overview of the Americas, see Woodward and Lewis 1998; Buisseret 2003; Harley 1988; Kagan 2000. For an overview specific to Guaman Poma’s mapamundi, see also Adorno 2011; 2014; forthcoming. On the creation of hybrid cartographic art adapting prehispanic Andean place-identification practice and Spanish chorographic tendencies, see Beyersdorff 2007. On the Inka use of landscape anomalies acting as mnemonic devices in the state-controlled social management of space, see Van de Guchte 1999.

3 Huacas are material objects or sites, such as rocks, springs, and caves that receive ritual attention because they are essentially sacred. Huacas are often landscape elements inhabited by a ‘force’ that is considered sacred, though it could also take the form of a built entity, like a temple. In many instances, huacas are things that are somehow extra-ordinary, taking a form that is other than the usual (Van de Guchte 1999, 149–66; Garcilaso de la Vega 1966, 76–77). Huacas were also associated with dangerous or destructive powers (Silverblatt 1987, 173). Claudia Brosseder’s The power of huacas (2014) examines the diachronic nature of the dialogue surrounding huacas between indigenous Andean religious specialists and the Jesuits, who recorded indigenous practices for purposes of extirpation. Tamara Bray’s edited volume, The archaeology of wak’as (2014), defines huaca as ‘an idol, statue, or image (ídolo; bulto), or an oratory or shrine-like place (adoratorio), with the two typically closely linked’ (5), and includes chapters discussing the possible antiquity of huacas dating to the Tiwanaku (ca. 1–500 CE) and Wari (ca. 500–1000 CE), Inca landscape constructions, Inca reconstructions of previously existing sites, and huanca, or standing stones or stelae, that served as huacas marking territorial rights. For an in-depth art historical analysis of Guaman Poma’s iconography for colonial religion, see Trever 2011. For an informed, in-depth examination of the role of stones as huaca and other powerful manifestations, see Dean 2010.

4 The letter is in the Archivo General de las Indias in Seville, Audiencia de Lima 145, and can be viewed at www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/docs/carta1615/index.htm.

5 The tiled and/or checkerboard flooring with converging vertical lines is a pictorial motif derived from Renaissance perspectival shorthand that Guaman Poma carried over from his illustration work on Martín de Murúa’s Historia general del Peru. Art historian Thomas B. F. Cummins suggests that both Guaman Poma and Murúa would have been familiar with this tradition from the Franciscan Luis Jerónimo de Oré’s Simbolo catholico indiano, published in Lima in 1598; see Cummins 2008, 151–52; Jerónimo de Oré 1992 [1598].

6 For a detailed examination of Guaman Poma’s self-portraits and what they reveal about dress, lineage, visual sign systems, and the idea of self-presentation in the viceregal Andes, see Kilroy-Eubanks 2018. See also Carolyn Dean (1999) on the role of clothing in public transformation of indigenous elite in order to emphasize status, ancestry, and identity.

7 On Baroque aesthetics and the Baroque in Peru see, for instance, Mujica Pinilla 2003; Bailey, 2010.

8 ‘Contact zone’ is a term Mary Louise Pratt uses to refer to ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power … ’ (1990).

9 Figure 12 documents a typically abusive situation, whereby a colonial administrator orders an African slave to violently punish an Andean male, the colonial administrator appearing to somewhat gleefully (sadistically?) touch the hair of the tortured, bridging the center, as it were, qualifying the center as a locus of violence.

10 For a counterargument to Adorno’s idea that Guaman Poma’s images encode Andean spatial relations, see Fraser 1996. On spatial hierarchies in the visual arts focused on colonial Andean murals, see also Cohen Suarez 2013.

11 In Bhabha’s original text, he is speaking about the figure of Bipin Chandra Pal, an Indian nationalist, depicted in Benedict Anderson’s essay on nationalism, Imagined communities. The sentence reads: ‘He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized, is emphatically not to be English.’ This reinforces the idea that colonial power derives in part from the ambiguity of one’s social place in relation to the colonial power. Guaman Poma, then, usurps the colonial instrument of power—written text, the book—and subverts its authority in relation to the determined coherence of Andean visuality and structures of seeing (Bhabha 1994).

12 Again, Guaman Poma’s personal ladino biography essentially reinforces his position as an agent and embodiment of liminality, mediation, and negotiation. See, for example, Adorno 1991, 232–70.

13 This phrase concerning how ‘meaning’ is achieved is adapted from the folklorist Henry Glassie (1999, 59).