“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.” - Yanna Yannakakis, 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.” - Barry Robinson, Itinerario
“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.” - Kathryn J. McKnight, Colonial Latin American Historical Review
“Lamana’s book is a ground-breaking study that will have a profound impact not only because of the substantive contribution it makes to our understanding of the first decades of the conquest but also because of the interdisciplinary methodology and theoretical model that it employs. . . . Lamana’s highly compelling study will change the way researchers from all disciplines read colonial sources.” - Galen Brokaw, Hispanic Review
“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.” - Peter Gose, A Contracorriente
“Domination without Dominance is a theoretically historical and historically theoretical argument. Through his valiant and successful effort to learn from the Incas, Gonzalo Lamana shifts the geopolitics of knowledge, stepping back and disengaging from the basic epistemic principles on which the humanities and the social sciences are founded. His detailed analysis of the first two decades of encounters between Incas and Spaniards unveils how from then to today, historical narratives managed to tell half of the story as if it were the totality.”—Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Idea of Latin America
“Far from contributing to the well-known story of European victories against overwhelming odds, this reinterpetation of the conquest of Peru portrays complex, human adversaries who each used their own cultural understandings in an effort to gain control over the other. Everyone who seeks to step outside the vision of the Spanish conquest imposed by the victors since the sixteenth century will find this study invaluable.”—Karen Spalding, author of Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule
“In this book—the very first ethnographic history of the so-called ‘Conquest of the Incas’—Inca and Christian protagonists negotiate not only who they are vis-à-vis one another but also, and centrally, the terms with which they would recognize their relationship. Combining literary criticism, anthropology, and history, Domination without Dominance extends the historical archive of the period to the present, and through ethnographic-textual analysis of modern historiography, shows ‘the Conquest’ as an event the conceptual politics of which linger today. This book is an important addition to archive studies, de-colonial scholarship, and cultural politics.”—Marisol de la Cadena, author of Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991
