Academic literature on the topic 'Incas, fiction'

This essay interrogates the tensions between historical fact and colonial fiction in Jean-François Marmontel’s Les Incas, ou le destruction de l’Empire du Pérou (1777). Through this study of deleted passages and publisher notes in the 1776 manuscript of the novel (Houghton Library, Harvard University), Marmontel’s concern with verisimilitude, truth, and objective reality belies the fantasy of conquest and the myths of American Indigeneity that are central to eighteenth-century French understandings and imaginings of the Inca Empire and the American continent as a whole. Politically, the novel served a dual purpose: to vehemently denounce the Spanish conquest of the Americas and to subversively critique the “fanaticism” of the ancien régime in the years leading up the 1789 Revolution. Across the Atlantic, the novel was read by generals of the Latin American Wars of Independence, and it shifted from an allegorical text to a direct call for revolution. Despite Marmontel’s aim of creating a philosophical and historical novel, Les Incas perpetuates the hegemonies and hierarchies of colonialism, falling back onto well-established tropes. In choosing what was considered in Europe as “exotic” as a vehicle for political critique, Les Incas maintains and reinforces the very systems against which the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century fought.

The article considers the French novel “Letters from a Peruvian Woman&8j1; (Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 1747) by Françoise de Graffigny, as well as the “Historical introduction…&8j1; (Introduction historique aux lettres péruviennes), which was included into the novel in 1752, and where the Inca Empire is described in an idealized way. The main source of information for F. de Graffigny was “The Royal commentaries of the Incas&8j1; by Garcilaso de la Vega (1609) and other philosophical, critical and fictional publications on American natives: Michel de Montaigne’s essays, the tragedy “Alzira, or the Americans&8j1; by Voltaire, etc. The “Historical introduction...&8j1; praises the wealth and wisdom of the Incas, the merits of their state organization. This article claims that the “Historical introduction…&8j1; plays an important ideological and compositional role in F. de Graffigny’s book: a utopian description of the Inca Empire serves as a specific philosophical frame for the novel with a love story. Ideas concerning the empire of the ancient Incas, as reflected in the fictional “Letters from a Peruvian Woman&8j1;, are congenial with the Age of Enlightenment.

The paper is an attempt at geopolitical contextualization and realpolitik reading of comic works by Alejandro Jodorowsky. The focus of the analysis is on the so-called ?Jodoverse? - a segment of Jodorowsky?s opus which includes three great science-fiction sagas - ?The Incal?, ?The Saga of the Metabarons? and ?Technopriests?. These works, which can be defined as ?space operas? in terms of genre, vividly evoke a futuristic vision of one of the possible cosmic futures of humanity. This paper aims to map those motives in this fictional universe that draw inspiration from the tradition of classical geopolitics, i.e., the practice of political realism. The author?s initial assumption is that the Jodoverse is designed to function as a (popular-cultural) reflection of earthly geopolitical principles in the mirror of outer space and that, therefore, the depiction of astropolitics in the works of Jodorowsky is nothing but cloning of realpolitik in infinite space above the earth?s orbit. In order to confirm this assumption, the author will use the geopolitical and astropolitical concepts of Karl Schmidt and Everett Dolman as a key to unravelling the secrets of the Jodoverse. For that purpose, Schmidt?s concept of the nomos of the earth will be used, as well as the teaching on technological determinism which is present in the works of both theorists. By applying these concepts to Jodorowsky?s comics, the author will try to prove how the ideas of classical geopolitics have their counterparts in the cosmic phantasms of this genius of the ninth art.