 |
|
  
|
||||
 GONZALO LAMANALicenciatura, Universidad de Buenos Aires Gonzalo Lamana's research and teaching explore themes of colonialism and subalternity, cultural contact, meaning-making, and historical change. Although his area of specialty is colonial Latin America—and in particular the Andean region—he explores these themes also through a comparative, cross-area and time study of colonial and postcolonial dynamics. His dissertation, “From Contact to Domination, the Production of Order in Early 16th-Century Peru,” offers a reinterpretation of the 20-year transition from the Inca empire to the Spanish colonial regime. First, he illuminates the struggles over meaning absent in most scholarship by recovering long-ignored native texts and paying attention to the revealing flaws of Spanish sources. He therefore challenges the prevalent understanding of the conquest that casts Spaniards and Incas as Western rational actors engaged in mutually intelligible acts. Once horses that can eat people or full-moon-only attacks abandon the space of curiosities to become key parts of the story, an alternative and richer image begins to make sense on its own. Second, by moving the focus from wars to everyday arenas of cross-cultural interaction, he reveals the coexistence of plural visions and political projects in those years. Thus, he recasts the fluid alliances among multiple Inca, ethnic, and Spanish factions, making intelligible, for instance, that both a bishop and an Inca king would join forces against Spanish conquistadors. Building on—yet also rethinking—scholarship that conceives of colonization as a cultural project of power and meaning, his research explores the nature of the evolving shifts in the order of things and how the colonial regime emerged from them. As a means to undo the authoritative effect of the official representations of Spanish colonialism—and make them visible as such—in his research he uses an array of everyday archival documents. To that end, he has carried out extensive work in archives and libraries in Peru, Spain, Argentina, and the United States. Lamana is currently turning his dissertation into a book, and working on his next research project: examining colonial acts of reality-making through the lenses of magicality. The idea is to denaturalize and de-Occidentalize conceptions of power that conceive of it in terms of instrumental, rational action. Building on attempts from different critical traditions at turning magic into a category of analysis that speaks not of the exotic but of the everyday, he wants to explore how magicality, as a way of reasoning and acting, can help us understand the nature of colonial relations, both of ordinary people’s lives and of those in power. Selected Publications:
|