Complicates the Spanish conquest of Peru

Offering an alternative narrative of the conquest of the Incas, Gonzalo Lamana both examines and shifts away from the colonial imprint that still permeates most accounts of the conquest. Lamana focuses on a key moment of transition: the years that bridged the first contact between Spanish conquistadores and Andean peoples in 1531 and the moment, around 1550, when a functioning colonial regime emerged. Using published accounts and array of archival sources, he focuses on questions of subalternization, meaning making, copying, and exotization, which proved crucial to both the Spaniards and the Incas. On the one hand, he re-inserts different epistemologies into the conquest narrative, making central to the plot often-dismissed, discrepant stories such as books that were expected to talk and year-long attacks that could only be launched under a full moon. On the other hand, he questions the dominant image of a clear distinction between Inca and Spaniard, showing instead that on the battlefield as much as in everyday arenas such as conversion, market exchanges, politics, and land tenure, the parties blurred into each other in repeated instances of mimicry.

Lamana’s redefinition of the order of things reveals that, contrary to the conquerors’ accounts, what the Spanairds achieved was a “domination without dominance.” This conclusion undermines common ideas of Spanish (and Western) superiority. It shows that casting order as a by-product of military action rests on a pervasive fallacy: the translation of military superiority into cultural superiority. In constant dialogue with critical thinking from different disciplines and traditions, Lamana illuminates how this new interpretation of the conquest of the Incas revises current understandings of Western colonialism and the emergence of still-current global configurations.

"“Domination without Dominance is a remarkable and revealing analysis of Inca-Spanish relations in the Andes. In this work, Gonzalo Lamana unites the finest of discursive analysis with bold historical research in an argument that may fundamentally alter the way the first twenty years of Inca-Spanish relations are understood. . . . Domination without Dominance is deeply exciting and of fundamental importance to the field of colonial literary scholarship. Lamana’s work is careful, thorough, and persuasive. . . . Domination without Dominance is the kind of argument that stimulates a desire for interdisciplinary dialogue and is one of those rare works of scholarship that achieves a real depth of interdisciplinary integration.”" - Colonial Latin American Historical Review

"“Gonzalo Lamana boldly reinterprets the first twenty years of Spanish-Andean contact in an effort to understand how a Spanish colonial order in the former Inca Empire came into being. He does so with theoretical sophistication and through an innovative reading of standard Spanish and ex-post-facto native sources, as well as lesser known, locally produced sources. The result is a compelling recasting of the conquest of Peru that effectively dismantles the linear narrative of Spanish domination that has been standard fare since the sixteenth century.”" - American Historical Review

"“Lamana has produced something original in this old story, something that serious scholars of colonialism must read. He successfully shows how his Andean subjects recognised ‘the arbitrariness of power’ in their day, and he engages in a compelling parallel effort to ‘unsettle’ the epistemological assumptions undergirding the history of early colonial Peru.”" - Itinerario

"“This important book will fundamentally change how scholars look at proto-colonial Peru. . . . Theoretically, the book is well-informed and refreshingly anthropological for a project that so thoroughly overlaps with history and literary criticism. . . . [Lamana] has shown us how to read this notoriously opaque period of Andean history in a new and tremendously more productive way. This landmark book will be of lasting value for that contribution.”" - A Contracorriente