The Department of Spanish and Portuguese presents a public lecture by Professor Leonardo Velloso-Lyons titled: Imperial History, Quechua Philology, and the Andean Hinterlands

Time: Tuesday, March 1st at 2:30PM EST

Place: Oxford Road Building Presentation Room (1390 Oxford Road)

Description: Professor Velloso-Lyons is currently Mabelle McLeod Lewis Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. This talk is the first product of Velloso-Lyons’s second book project, which springs from his findings concerning early modern knowledge, colonialism, genre and rhetoric. It examines how writers deploy their knowledge of non-European languages and cultures to create a hierarchy of regional groups legible to colonial authorities. These writers’s use of non-European languages in historical and literary works creates what he tentatively calls “implied geographies” that order, homogenize, and even efface certain non-European groups for the benefit of other non-European groups. Although Velloso-Lyons’s focus remains on writers from the many reaches of the Ibero-Atlantic empire, he turns away from the sixteenth-century’s reckoning with global colonialism toward seventeenth-century writers’ attempting (and ultimately failing) to create uniformity among non-European groups by effacing the ethnic and cultural diversity of each region in favor of uniform identities that would fit better the colonial superstructure. Velloso-Lyons currently anticipates chapters on Viceregal Peru, New Spain, Brazil, the Kingdom of Kongo, and Granada; this talk focuses on the Andean world, introducing some of the problems he expects to discuss with respect to sources from these regions.