For Andeanists, that writing played a central role in postconquest society's formation will come as a familiar refrain. Inca-era recordkeepers, accustomed to registering information in knotted-string khipus, became (alphabetically) literate only once compelled by colonial circumstance to express themselves on paper. It follows that writing enabled, or at least supported, the process of cultural domination in the Andes.
Reading the Illegible questions the reach of this narrative. In four diverse and well-argued chapters, Laura Leon Llerena contends that Indigenous writing—both in khipus and in ink—served as a vehicle for enduring antihegemonic resistance. The book, centering the highland Peruvian province of Huarochirí, places a constellation of exceptional seventeenth-century works “on an imaginary table” to better contextualize the Huarochirí Manuscript—the only book-length colonial-era text on Indigenous religion written in Quechua (p. 176). The result is, for this reader, a thoroughly successful effort to pluralize the categories of literacy and those who wrote...
