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 period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility.

The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers’ technology of alphabetic writing.

Reading the Illegible 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.

“Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike many other writers, what we have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with.”

What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it. The second edition introduces remixing as an additional signature move and is updated with new attention to digital writing, which both extends and rethinks the ideas of earlier chapters.

In Rewriting Maya Religion Garry Sparks examines the earliest religious documents composed by missionaries and native authors in the Americas, including a reconstruction of the first original, explicit Christian theology written in the Americas—the nearly 900-page Theologia Indorum (Theology for [or of] the Indians), initially written in Mayan languages by Friar Domingo de Vico by 1554. Sparks traces how the first Dominican missionaries to the Maya repurposed native religious ideas, myths, and rhetoric in their efforts to translate a Christianity and how, in this wake, K’iche’ Maya elites began to write their own religious texts, like the Popol Vuh. This ethnohistory of religion critically reexamines the role and value of indigenous authority during the early decades of first contact between a Native American people and Christian missionaries.
 
Centered on the specific work of Dominicans among the Highland Maya of Guatemala in the decades prior to the arrival of the Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth century, the book focuses on the various understandings of religious analyses—Hispano-Catholic and Maya—and their strategic exchanges, reconfigurations, and resistance through competing efforts of religious translation. Sparks historically contextualizes Vico’s theological treatise within both the wider set of early literature in K’iche’an languages and the intellectual shifts between late medieval thought and early modernity, especially the competing theories of language, ethnography, and semiotics in the humanism of Spain and Mesoamerica at the time.
 
Thorough and original, Rewriting Maya Religion serves as an ethnohistorical frame for continued studies on Highland Maya religious symbols, discourse, practices, and logic dating back to the earliest documented evidence. It will be of great significance to scholars of religion, ethnohistory, linguistics, anthropology, and Latin American history.
 

Roll Me in Your Arms, Volume I includes 180 unexpurgated songs collected by Randolph, with tunes transcribed from the original singers.