Discursive Territories and Epistemic Violence in the Andean Colonial Indigenous Literature

Colonial Andean indigenous literature remains a relatively unknown field of study outside specialized circles on Andean culture. Indeed, documents such as the Huarochiri Manuscript have been studied for decades by historians, linguists and anthropologists who see in them a source of information about the pre-Columbian world that is no longer directly accessible. However, as colonial, and postcolonial studies have shown since the 1980s, ¹ American colonial discourses can rather be seen as the theater of a universe of tensions that reveals us the social and epistemic struggles that were taking place at this time of great transformations. This chapter proposes to examine the aforementioned document from the angle of the epistemic violence that it reveals us and, specifically, that which concerns the knowledge construction related to territory. In order to carry out this proposal, we will first present some theoretical and methodological assumptions that will then guide the analysis of the manuscript.