Earthquake History of the Americas

Abstract

This essay reads Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) as a meditation on the all-devouring historical system produced by the colonial-global. The Quechua historian's particular adaptation of both Christian scriptural knowledge and the vexed early modern European tradition of natural and moral philosophy generates what I am calling an earthquake history: a figuration of colonial reality as a swallowing up by the earth, and a deployment of earthquake as a mode of interpretation that continually pushes against colonial knowledge. With his tremor-ridden text, Guaman Poma inaugurates a strand of earthquake thinking that also informs the contemporaneous Andean-born writer, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Garcilaso too discerns in earthquake a kind of theoretical framework for ideas that will, in turn, shape the colonially embedded innovations of Daniel Defoe, whose new generic formation, the English novel, emerged with the rise of European global subjecthood in the eighteenth century. Reading across these disparate writers, the essay traces the broad contours of an earthquake history that Guaman Poma helps us to see, a history expressed differently by writers throughout the Americas, yet rooted in the ongoing and always uncertain nature of settler colonial time.