A01=Laura Leon Llerena
Aesthetics of illegibility
Author_Laura Leon Llerena
Book history
Category=JBSL11
Category=JHMC
Category=NHK
colonial Peru
Critical theory
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Experimental writing
forthcoming
Huarochiri
Illegibility in literature
Literary theory
Manuscript studies
Material texts
Modern and contemporary literature
Reading the unreadable
Semiotics and meaning
Text and image studies
Textual interpretation
Visual culture studies
Writing as material practice
Product details
- ISBN 9780816557226
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jun 2026
- Publisher: University of Arizona Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Laura Leon Llerena is an assistant professor at Durham University (UK). Her research concentrates on the circulation of knowledge produced by and about Indigenous peoples from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
