Overview

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quich Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work. Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations. An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods decolonizes readers' perspective by setting Mayan and Andean authorship center stage and illustrates the schisms and shifts in Native civilizations and literatures of Latin America in a way that other literary studies, which relegate Native literature to a prelude to Spanish-language literature, have not yet done. By demonstrating the power of Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America, Fredrick illuminates the profound spiritual dissension and radically conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish conquest.

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9781496236753

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“Sharonah Fredrick’s comparative analysis of K’iche’ and Andean foundational thought in An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods goes beyond previous twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship while still taking into account that scholarship. The author is perhaps the only scholar whose training allows the comparison of these two sixteenth-century Indigenous texts put down on parchment more or less at the same time but in two distinct cultural and geographic Amerindian spaces.”—Thomas Ward, author of Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature “A contribution to scholarship in ancient Mesoamerica as well as the Andes.”—James L. Fitzsimmons, coeditor of Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands: Integration, Interaction, Dissolution

Author Information

Sharonah Esther Fredrick teaches in the College of Charleston’s Department of Hispanic Studies. She is the Colonial Americas editor for Routledge Resources Online—The Renaissance World.  

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