Forthcoming Special Issue: An Insurgent Manuscript: Contemporary Re-readings of La Nueva corónica y buen gobierno
Notas de Antropología de las Américas (NAA), the open-access digital journal of the Department of Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, is pleased to announce the publication, toward the end of 2026, of the Special Issue “An Insurgent Manuscript: Contemporary Re-readings of La Nueva corónica y buen gobierno”.
More than four centuries after it was written, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s work continues to challenge the ways in which we read, narrate, and represent the colonial world. Its interweaving of writing and image documents an order shaped by violence, translation, and contestation. At once manuscript, archive, and political gesture, the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno remains open to new questions.
This Special Issue returns to the work through the concerns and debates of the present. Its contributions explore the manuscript’s insurgent force, the complexity of its visual and textual languages, and its relevance to current reflections on memory, power, territory, knowledge, and justice. The Special Issue approaches the text as a living interlocutor—a work capable of unsettling inherited narratives and opening new horizons for research on the Americas.
The project’s transatlantic dimension carries particular resonance insofar as the autograph manuscript is held by The Royal Danish Library—Det Kgl. Bibliotek—in Copenhagen. From this European archive, which the manuscript entered probably in the seventeenth century, Guaman Poma’s visual and textual voice continues to generate new readings, encounters, and critical displacements.
The guest-edited Special Issue is curated by a multidisciplinary group consisting of Angélica Serna of Duke University, Georg W. Wink of the University of Copenhagen, and María Elena Ansótegui of the University of Copenhagen.
The Bonn-based Editorial Team comprises Karoline Noack, Taynã Tagliati, Antje Gunsenheimer, Danitza Márquez Ramírez, Andrea Goytia, and Naomi Rattunde.
