Alberto Flores Galindo: In Search of an Inca

Gracias a mis amigos Chuck Walker y Carlos Aguirre acabo de recibir el libro en inglés del clásico de Tito Flores Galindo “Buscando un Inca” (In Search of An Inca. Identiy and Utopia in the Andes), publicado este año por la prestigiosa editorial Cambridge University Press. Con esta edición la academia angloparlante podrá conocer este fascinante libro.

A continuación reproduzco el texto de Jean Franco de Columbia University que está en la contratapa del libro.

Actualización: Gracias al historiador José Ragas que nos envió una web donde figura la ficha del libro, la tabla de contenidos, comentarios y enlaces relacionados. Allí encontrarán artículos de reconocidos historiadores desarrollando las ideas principales del libro de Tito.

“When the Spanish conquerors garroted Atahualpa in 1535, they killed an emperor but inaugurated the myth of the Inca´s return. Flores Galindo, in his now-classic In Search of an Inca, traces the utopian myth that has persisted in many forms in the Andean region down to the present, inspiring uprising, prophecies, sects, and local rituals. The most spectacular of the uprising was the Tupac Amaru rebellion of 1780 that was punished with such severity that public indigenous culture was forced underground to be kept alive in the prodigious Andean memory bank. For as Flores Galindo emphasizes there is not equivalent historical memory to that of the Andes, either in Europe or in Mexico. In search of an Inca follows the underground path of myth and memory and the ethnic tensions that have preoccupied Peru´s greatest thinkers. It is an absorbing story that needed to be told”. Jean Franco, Columbia University

Y este es el texto con el que la Cambridge University Press reseña el libro:

“In Search of an Inca examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice, from the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century until the late twentieth century. It stresses the recurrence of the Andean Utopia that is, the idealization of the pre-colonial past as an era of harmony, justice, and prosperity and the foundation for political and social agendas for the future. In this award-winning work, Alberto Flores Galindo highlights how different groups imagined the pre-Hispanic world as a model for a new society. These included those conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century but also rebels in the colonial and modern era and a heterogeneous group of intellectuals and dissenters. A sweeping and accessible history of the Andes over the past 500 years, In Search of an Inca offers important reflections on and grounds for comparison of memory, utopianism, and resistence”