Description:

Gonzalo Lamana's How "Indians" Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory offers an alternative interpretation of how Amerindian colonial thinkers conceived of the order of things in the Andes. Shifting away from the predominant scholarly view that sees Indigenous-Spanish relations through ethnic or cultural lenses, Lamana argues that colonial era intellectuals Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, and Guaman Poma de Ayala saw emerging racism as something corseting both Indigenous and Europeans, and that their writing intended nothing more and nothing less than to change the world. But not through political reforms of the colonial systems, but by changing how people saw and made sense of reality, one reader at a time. De la Vega, el Inca, and de Ayala belong to the same tradition of figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin or Gerald Vizenor. Lamana suggests that their ideas about how to live in a world in which discrimination and coloniality were the norm, and how to change the way in which people gave meaning to that world, are still relevant today.