I propose rejecting it and suggesting that it be entered in next year's book review competition, and then next year rejecting it because it's not really a book.
Was it supposed to be obvious that the song was written by someone named after Tupac Amaru II, and not the leader of the rebellion himself? (I had mistakenly assumed the review meant the latter, until looking it up.)
Yeah, I thought that was a great ending, but you need to know something about rap. I'm tempted to make it a link to the rapper's Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur ), but not sure if that would be too much meddling.
I did put another Wikipedia link to the overall case in there.
A long time ago I've complained how a certain review[1] wasn't for me because it was too poetic-y for plain old me. I still think about the review occasionally, and while my complaint from back then stands, I have since expanded on it. It's this meddling you're alluding to that bothered me, too. Not in the sense that you specifically meddled with the Don Juan review, but that the author himself put too many explaining links into it.
The complaint is that you should either be matter-of-fact and be generous with citations, or you stick to the clever/funny format you've chosen for the review and explain little, if anything. Give the reader just enough hints to have them go on a journey of their own understanding. If the reader didn't need the hints in the first place, great, they can feel clever about it. If the reader needed the hints and refuses to reasearch for themselves, so be it and let them eat cake. If the reader rises to the challenge, let them find out for themselves; something as simple as a Google search can bring a measure of satisfaction even if it leads to the very same Wikipedia article you would've linked anyway.
In any case, don't try to be clever *and* provide too many explanations. It's like unironically explaining your own joke.
In that sense, I agree that a Tupac Shakur link would've been too much for sure, and the Ronald Ray Howard one was borderline because the interested reader could not have messed up the google search.
This review could have benefited from a little more seriousness. I don't have time to go over it right now (and at any rate it would be best if specialists weighed in), but:
a) AFAIK, we have no real evidence that Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui ever saw Ollantay on stage, or read it. It may very well postdate the rebellion entirely.
b) There's something that everybody should know: while poetry is nearly universal (it is closely related to song - this also explains why highly formal poetry is so common), theatre has developed very, very few times in the history of mankind, and spread by diffusion. We need strong evidence if we are to postulate yet another independent invention of theatre, and, in Ollantay's case, we have evidence *to the contrary*. (There _is_ partial evidence that a Mayan play, Rabinal Achi, has strong pre-colonial elements. Compare it with Ollantay...)
Here b) is so basic that there's now no doubt a market for academic papers complicating it. Has it really not filtered into general knowledge? (Borges was aware of b) in the middle of the 20th century (see his story on Averroes), and many of his readers would have found out through him.)
Greece, India, China are the ones everybody agrees on. Chinese and Japanese theatre may have forked before the stage where everybody agrees it's already theatre and not just street performance. And then there's Rabinal Achi.
It doesn't even need that. I believe there are a couple of plays that only have one speaking part But they do have a stage and a few props.
I think the line between story telling and plays is very fuzzy. There are lots of cases where it's quite clear which side of the line it is on, but there are instances everywhere along the dimension. Exactly where you put the division is nearly arbitrary. And there's also a fuzzy line between plays and dance.
I worry this will boil down into a semantic argument. But is there a real divide between public performance, dance show, myth retelling etc and "theatre"?
One evolves into the others slowly (at the scale of centuries) - and only now and then. Ollantay is not just basically Spanish theatre in Quechua - I hear it has influences of 18th-century Italian melodrama.
That may all be true, but to me the review’s power isn’t in proving causality -- it’s in showing how a story, however constructed, can resonate so precisely that it shapes perception, and sometimes, fate. Whether Ollantay predated the rebellion or not, the myth still did its work.
Did it? A story on a rainforest ("anti") leader courting the Inca's daughter and impregnating her may for all we know have made the rounds before Ollantay was written, but what evidence is there that it influenced José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Tupac Amaru II)? What is far more likely is that general awareness of the Incas, and in particular of Tupac Amaru, leader of the post-Atahualpa Incan resistance and JGC's imagined or real ancestor, played a role in getting a rebellion against colonial exploitation started. Analogous things have happened in many places.
Fair enough, direct influence is impossible to pin down. But I didn’t read the review as trying to prove that so much as showing how story and history can start to rhyme, until the myth itself takes on a kind of agency.
From the review the setting of Ollantay seems fundamentally christian so it doesn't make sense for a pre-contact origin. There was a major fad in the 1700's of europeans writing things usually critical of western society and put it in the mouths of exotic peoples from the iroquois to persians.
Thanks for this helpful perspective. It sounds like you know a bit about the history of this play. I'm curious about the following on Wikipedia (which is the only source I've checked):
"There are six original copies of this play. One is from around 1770 and attributed to the priest Antonio Valdés, and is held in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Cuzco, Peru. Two are believed to be derived from this one, written by Dr. Justo Pastor Justiniani and Justo Apu Sahuaraura Inca, and held in the General Archive of the Nation of Peru and the National Library of Peru, respectively. Two others are found in the Dominican Convert of Cuzco, and the third was published by Johann Jakob von Tschudi on the basis of a manuscript with origins in La Paz, Bolivia. "
Should we be surprised at the two others, and the claimed manuscript in La Paz, that are supposedly *not* derived from Antonio Valdes?
I'm not the wokest guy in the world (I was literally contemplating spending my middle and old age finding a way to fight feminism until I realized I didn't really have a praxis)... but one could argue the Spanish running the extractive institutions were much more responsible for the ensuing killings rather than the play. The Irish tend to look fondly on the prior rebellions before the ones that finally worked, even if they mostly got a lot of Irish people killed at the time. (Deiseach can jump in and correct me.)
OK, I get it, it's a joke. But usually these days people tend to blame the oppressive institutions rather than the people doing the rebelling.
The cognitohazard bit is a neat idea, though--maybe everyone has their own personal King in Yellow (a play mentioned by Robert W Chambers and often referred to in Cthulhu Mythos stories that drives the reader insane). I wonder if you could counteract the problem by outlining what it would be? Actually trying to write it is probably too dangerous.
I sometimes wonder if the Black Legend was really all that exaggerated, if that level of resource extraction was still going on by the time of Napoleon.
The idea of a "Black Legend" is itself Spanish propaganda. That doesn't mean it's necessarily false, merely that it's a term that would exist whether it was false or not.
The only part of it that's lies is the implication that everyone else wasn't just as bad.
The mean lifespan of a slave on a Caribbean plantation was 7 years. They needed to constantly import more, because the conditions were horrible enough that it made sustaining the population naturally completely impossible. And it really didn't matter much who was running the plantations.
The miners in South America had similar life expectancies, and Spain used the local population to sustain it instead.
The Spanish get a bad reputation but were pretty decent as colonial masters of that time go.
They introduced lots of useful domestic plants and animals, technologies like metal working and water mills, printing presses and universities. The spanish kings also empowered humanist catholic priests that forbid the enslavement of indians centuries before the anglo-americans did anything similar and also did some interesting things like the jesuits missions in Paraguay that helped the indians improve their lives.
Before the spaniards the Americas consisted of very poor and brutal societies which at best had barely an early neolithic level of development and after independence Hispanic America had at least a century of civil wars, revolutions and dictatorships.
This is maybe my favorite one yet, but is it meant to be written as a factual account or more in the Sam Kriss mode of fictional truth? I tried to find some evidence that Tupac Amaru II actually heard Ollantay and couldn't (though I didn't try very hard).
Also immediately thought of Sam Kriss, although imo this doesn't meet the (high!) bar of his best work - although maybe that's because my favorite part is when his essays lift off from the plane of reality and ascend into madness, and that wouldn't be appropriate for this venue.
I agree that the flavours of the pieces are somewhat similar, but I also think they reach somewhat opposite conclusions about Hinckley as a tie-in. This review positions people as victims of their stories, but Kriss' piece seems to put people like Hinckley in the driver's seat with respect to the stories themselves.
What I found is a Spanish-language blog mentioning briefly something on the lines of "it is said that Ollantay was performed in front of tupac amaru before the start of is rebellion", so I think it's likely false, but not made up by the author of this review specifically
A brilliant review about a mediocre play that became a great story. The cognitohazard framing is spot on. The play wasn’t responsible for the rebellion; it just happened to find the right person at the wrong time.
Maybe I’m not fully getting the joke here, or maybe I’ve thought too much about apologetics, but isn’t it incredibly more likely that the play was written after the real-life events, rather than before? I’m interested in the specifics of how the different copies matched, if we carbon dated the manuscripts, if there are date stamped records of the guy that came to find it, etc.
IMO the intrigue of “who wrote it” or whatever is important to the prose of this review and a quick aside at the very end would have added to it. I get the vagueness is fun but now I want to know the actual answer.
The review mentions in a full two paragraphs that this is an unresolved question in the actual scholarship, starting with "It must be reiterated that scholarship on this point is incredibly varied".
The review's joke is that Túpac Amaru II (and people named after him, like the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur) had the ability to write "information hazards" that are powerful enough to incite deadly violence in just the right kind of receptive people, like how "Soulja's Story" inspired Ronald Ray Howard to shoot a policeman. No, it's not stringent logic; that's what makes it a joke, but a joke with just enough funny coincidence[1] to not be a silly joke.
[1] It's not actually a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I hear you, and I’m sure existing scholarship not resolving the issue or having consensus but I’m from the part of rationality that likes to think the traditional institutions are incompetent and if I just had the data I requested the answer would be trivial to discern.
"She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin."
What a hoot. Wayback int eh 1950's there was a female Peruvian singer whose stage name was Yma Sumac. From Wikipedia:
"Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo (born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo; September 13, 1922] – November 1, 2008), known as Yma Sumac (or Imma Sumack), was a Peruvian singer. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. ... Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart"
She still had some popularity and her records were still around in the late 60s when I was in college, but I guess that she is completely unknown to younger people now.
I went on a Wikipedia binge about her a few weeks ago and was going to mention that here! For years I only knew of her as an occasionally entry in crossword puzzles. (Any three letter sequence that involves two vowels and a common consonant is going to show up a decent amount, even if Yoko Ono and Brian Eno are more common.) But I think I heard one of her songs on the radio and realized she had to be part of the inspiration for the opera singer in The Fifth Element.
Somehow my Wikipedia binge about her didn’t turn up this character from this play.
The conclusion reminds me of the painting "The Wild Chase" by Franz von Stuck, which shows Wotan charging on horseback, sword drawn, leading a procession of the unhallowed dead. What is intriguing is that Wotan looks suspiciously like Adolf Hitler, iconic hair and mustache as such. Conspiracy has it that Hitler saw this painting as a youth, and modeled himself after it.
And when the painting was drawn? 1889, the same year that Hitler was born
To be fair, the play is a comedy (they get married in the end), whereas in real life it's a tragedy (they die).
In general it's true we should all feel compelled to do our duty, for a life well lived, although those are some pretty dark examples in the end. I suppose karmic debt is personal, so who am I to say.
> This was a position designed to make the curaca identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of corregidor, it was also a way to get very rich.
Curacas didn't _get_ very rich. They were born rich. The position was usually hereditary.
> from a 1780 population of 1.2 million, 100,000 people were killed.
The source for the 100,000 figure appears to be "La oración de la tarde: novela escrita sobre el célebre drama del mismo titulo" written by Antonio Rotondo (page 326). At least that's what Wikipedia says: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebeli%C3%B3n_de_T%C3%BApac_Amaru_II
It's interesting that Rotondo says (translated from Spanish): "A pardon was immediately published, and the principal leaders of the insurrection having accepted it, the insurrection was suppressed, and thus the last sparks of the terrible uprising in Spanish South America were extinguished, in which more than 100,000 people perished, both rebels and loyalists". This seems to contradict the reviewer's statement that after the main battle "this was not so much a war as a series of massacres. Anybody who might conceivably offer resistance was killed". Does he/she have another source besides Rotondo? Is he/she talking about the time following the main battle yet before the pardon was issued?
Rotondo also says (translated from Spanish): "[the leading Spanish general Jose del Valle] finally managed to return with his depleted column to Cuzco, where he found that during his expedition the chief José Gabriel Tupac-Amaru, his wife, his two sons, an uncle, a brother-in-law and several relatives, all had been executed in the public square". This appears to contradict the reviewer's statement that "the general who led the Spanish army pronounced his opinion on what should happen to Túpac. This sentence was carried out".
Maybe these are just minor details, Rotondo was novelist not a historian after all. But then, why use him as a source at all? Unless there's a better source confirming the extraordinary 100,000 figure.
"Don Antonio Valdez was a parish priest in Tinta,......Around 1775, he invited José Gabriel and some other honored guests to a performance of a play he had finished putting together. Set in Cuzco in the 1400s, Valdez told his assembled audience that Ollantay was a Castilian version of a Quechua play.4
After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,"
The most important thing for this reviews' sequence of events is how solid this claim is. If we know the future Tupac saw the play, that is actually a big deal. If the date of the play is actually nebulous and could have been after the rebellion, well that's a whole other thing.
I sent my digital servants to find out the truth of this matter, and the impression I got is that the idea that Tupac Amaru saw the play is on shaky foundation and is likely wrong, but the reviewer didn't completely make it up out of thin air:
"The primary basis for the claim comes from 19th-century writers. Sir Clements R. Markham (1910) reported that when he visited the parish of Laris near Cusco in 1853, he met Pablo Justiniani – an octogenarian priest “in direct descent from the Incas”. Justiniani told Markham that he had “the text of the drama of Ollantay” and recalled details of its recent history. Importantly, Justiniani recalled that the play had been performed at Tinta “before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru”, who was by then the leader of a rebellion. Markham notes: “it was acted before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru, a friend of [Antonio] Valdez, who headed an insurrection against the Spaniards in 1782”."
This violates the rules because it's a book!
It's a play!
Technically, it's a rebellion.
I propose that we spend the majority of the comments arguing about whether a play qualifies as a book.
I propose rejecting it and suggesting that it be entered in next year's book review competition, and then next year rejecting it because it's not really a book.
Was it supposed to be obvious that the song was written by someone named after Tupac Amaru II, and not the leader of the rebellion himself? (I had mistakenly assumed the review meant the latter, until looking it up.)
Yeah, I thought that was a great ending, but you need to know something about rap. I'm tempted to make it a link to the rapper's Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur ), but not sure if that would be too much meddling.
I did put another Wikipedia link to the overall case in there.
it's perfect the way it is
Yes, the last line was *chef’s kiss*
I loved the ending, but I don't see why it didn't just say "That song was written, of course, by Tupac." Hits just as hard and is true.
Tupac's the rapper's full name was Tupac Amaru Shakur.
Wait, really? I haven’t felt this weird vertigo since Unsong.
His parents named him after Tupac Amaru II, because he was a native who rebelled against the colonizers.
Huh. TIL
A long time ago I've complained how a certain review[1] wasn't for me because it was too poetic-y for plain old me. I still think about the review occasionally, and while my complaint from back then stands, I have since expanded on it. It's this meddling you're alluding to that bothered me, too. Not in the sense that you specifically meddled with the Don Juan review, but that the author himself put too many explaining links into it.
The complaint is that you should either be matter-of-fact and be generous with citations, or you stick to the clever/funny format you've chosen for the review and explain little, if anything. Give the reader just enough hints to have them go on a journey of their own understanding. If the reader didn't need the hints in the first place, great, they can feel clever about it. If the reader needed the hints and refuses to reasearch for themselves, so be it and let them eat cake. If the reader rises to the challenge, let them find out for themselves; something as simple as a Google search can bring a measure of satisfaction even if it leads to the very same Wikipedia article you would've linked anyway.
In any case, don't try to be clever *and* provide too many explanations. It's like unironically explaining your own joke.
In that sense, I agree that a Tupac Shakur link would've been too much for sure, and the Ronald Ray Howard one was borderline because the interested reader could not have messed up the google search.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan
I’m slow on the uptake, I needed some of those explainers ;)
This review could have benefited from a little more seriousness. I don't have time to go over it right now (and at any rate it would be best if specialists weighed in), but:
a) AFAIK, we have no real evidence that Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui ever saw Ollantay on stage, or read it. It may very well postdate the rebellion entirely.
b) There's something that everybody should know: while poetry is nearly universal (it is closely related to song - this also explains why highly formal poetry is so common), theatre has developed very, very few times in the history of mankind, and spread by diffusion. We need strong evidence if we are to postulate yet another independent invention of theatre, and, in Ollantay's case, we have evidence *to the contrary*. (There _is_ partial evidence that a Mayan play, Rabinal Achi, has strong pre-colonial elements. Compare it with Ollantay...)
Here b) is so basic that there's now no doubt a market for academic papers complicating it. Has it really not filtered into general knowledge? (Borges was aware of b) in the middle of the 20th century (see his story on Averroes), and many of his readers would have found out through him.)
> theatre has developed very, very few times in the history of mankind
How many?
Greece, India, China are the ones everybody agrees on. Chinese and Japanese theatre may have forked before the stage where everybody agrees it's already theatre and not just street performance. And then there's Rabinal Achi.
Seems odd. An oral tradition of storytelling needs to just one or more extra story tellers to create a play.
Edit. But then, I suppose, it needs literacy for the play to survive and be reproducible.
I think it was one of these reviews which taught me that Greece didn’t develop the second actor for decades, possibly centuries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuteragonist
It doesn't even need that. I believe there are a couple of plays that only have one speaking part But they do have a stage and a few props.
I think the line between story telling and plays is very fuzzy. There are lots of cases where it's quite clear which side of the line it is on, but there are instances everywhere along the dimension. Exactly where you put the division is nearly arbitrary. And there's also a fuzzy line between plays and dance.
I worry this will boil down into a semantic argument. But is there a real divide between public performance, dance show, myth retelling etc and "theatre"?
One evolves into the others slowly (at the scale of centuries) - and only now and then. Ollantay is not just basically Spanish theatre in Quechua - I hear it has influences of 18th-century Italian melodrama.
That may all be true, but to me the review’s power isn’t in proving causality -- it’s in showing how a story, however constructed, can resonate so precisely that it shapes perception, and sometimes, fate. Whether Ollantay predated the rebellion or not, the myth still did its work.
Did it? A story on a rainforest ("anti") leader courting the Inca's daughter and impregnating her may for all we know have made the rounds before Ollantay was written, but what evidence is there that it influenced José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Tupac Amaru II)? What is far more likely is that general awareness of the Incas, and in particular of Tupac Amaru, leader of the post-Atahualpa Incan resistance and JGC's imagined or real ancestor, played a role in getting a rebellion against colonial exploitation started. Analogous things have happened in many places.
Fair enough, direct influence is impossible to pin down. But I didn’t read the review as trying to prove that so much as showing how story and history can start to rhyme, until the myth itself takes on a kind of agency.
From the review the setting of Ollantay seems fundamentally christian so it doesn't make sense for a pre-contact origin. There was a major fad in the 1700's of europeans writing things usually critical of western society and put it in the mouths of exotic peoples from the iroquois to persians.
Thanks for this helpful perspective. It sounds like you know a bit about the history of this play. I'm curious about the following on Wikipedia (which is the only source I've checked):
"There are six original copies of this play. One is from around 1770 and attributed to the priest Antonio Valdés, and is held in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Cuzco, Peru. Two are believed to be derived from this one, written by Dr. Justo Pastor Justiniani and Justo Apu Sahuaraura Inca, and held in the General Archive of the Nation of Peru and the National Library of Peru, respectively. Two others are found in the Dominican Convert of Cuzco, and the third was published by Johann Jakob von Tschudi on the basis of a manuscript with origins in La Paz, Bolivia. "
Should we be surprised at the two others, and the claimed manuscript in La Paz, that are supposedly *not* derived from Antonio Valdes?
I'm not the wokest guy in the world (I was literally contemplating spending my middle and old age finding a way to fight feminism until I realized I didn't really have a praxis)... but one could argue the Spanish running the extractive institutions were much more responsible for the ensuing killings rather than the play. The Irish tend to look fondly on the prior rebellions before the ones that finally worked, even if they mostly got a lot of Irish people killed at the time. (Deiseach can jump in and correct me.)
OK, I get it, it's a joke. But usually these days people tend to blame the oppressive institutions rather than the people doing the rebelling.
The cognitohazard bit is a neat idea, though--maybe everyone has their own personal King in Yellow (a play mentioned by Robert W Chambers and often referred to in Cthulhu Mythos stories that drives the reader insane). I wonder if you could counteract the problem by outlining what it would be? Actually trying to write it is probably too dangerous.
I sometimes wonder if the Black Legend was really all that exaggerated, if that level of resource extraction was still going on by the time of Napoleon.
The idea of a "Black Legend" is itself Spanish propaganda. That doesn't mean it's necessarily false, merely that it's a term that would exist whether it was false or not.
The only part of it that's lies is the implication that everyone else wasn't just as bad.
The mean lifespan of a slave on a Caribbean plantation was 7 years. They needed to constantly import more, because the conditions were horrible enough that it made sustaining the population naturally completely impossible. And it really didn't matter much who was running the plantations.
The miners in South America had similar life expectancies, and Spain used the local population to sustain it instead.
> The miners in South America had similar life expectancies
Do you have a source for this?
The Spanish get a bad reputation but were pretty decent as colonial masters of that time go.
They introduced lots of useful domestic plants and animals, technologies like metal working and water mills, printing presses and universities. The spanish kings also empowered humanist catholic priests that forbid the enslavement of indians centuries before the anglo-americans did anything similar and also did some interesting things like the jesuits missions in Paraguay that helped the indians improve their lives.
Before the spaniards the Americas consisted of very poor and brutal societies which at best had barely an early neolithic level of development and after independence Hispanic America had at least a century of civil wars, revolutions and dictatorships.
TIL that Cahokia and the Great Serpent Mound are on par with Stonehenge; thanks for the compliment!
"It’s because Ollantay wasn’t for us. It was for him."
In anarcho-dramatist circles the technical term for this is "double-reverse-incepto-mousetrap"
This is maybe my favorite one yet, but is it meant to be written as a factual account or more in the Sam Kriss mode of fictional truth? I tried to find some evidence that Tupac Amaru II actually heard Ollantay and couldn't (though I didn't try very hard).
Now that you mention it I do get a Krissian vibe from this one, wouldn't be shocked if he was the author (of the review, not the play)
Also immediately thought of Sam Kriss, although imo this doesn't meet the (high!) bar of his best work - although maybe that's because my favorite part is when his essays lift off from the plane of reality and ascend into madness, and that wouldn't be appropriate for this venue.
Interestingly, the mention of John Hinckley reminded me of a recent piece by Sam Kriss about him: https://thepointmag.com/politics/american-idols/
I agree that the flavours of the pieces are somewhat similar, but I also think they reach somewhat opposite conclusions about Hinckley as a tie-in. This review positions people as victims of their stories, but Kriss' piece seems to put people like Hinckley in the driver's seat with respect to the stories themselves.
What I found is a Spanish-language blog mentioning briefly something on the lines of "it is said that Ollantay was performed in front of tupac amaru before the start of is rebellion", so I think it's likely false, but not made up by the author of this review specifically
A brilliant review about a mediocre play that became a great story. The cognitohazard framing is spot on. The play wasn’t responsible for the rebellion; it just happened to find the right person at the wrong time.
Maybe I’m not fully getting the joke here, or maybe I’ve thought too much about apologetics, but isn’t it incredibly more likely that the play was written after the real-life events, rather than before? I’m interested in the specifics of how the different copies matched, if we carbon dated the manuscripts, if there are date stamped records of the guy that came to find it, etc.
IMO the intrigue of “who wrote it” or whatever is important to the prose of this review and a quick aside at the very end would have added to it. I get the vagueness is fun but now I want to know the actual answer.
The review mentions in a full two paragraphs that this is an unresolved question in the actual scholarship, starting with "It must be reiterated that scholarship on this point is incredibly varied".
The review's joke is that Túpac Amaru II (and people named after him, like the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur) had the ability to write "information hazards" that are powerful enough to incite deadly violence in just the right kind of receptive people, like how "Soulja's Story" inspired Ronald Ray Howard to shoot a policeman. No, it's not stringent logic; that's what makes it a joke, but a joke with just enough funny coincidence[1] to not be a silly joke.
[1] It's not actually a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I hear you, and I’m sure existing scholarship not resolving the issue or having consensus but I’m from the part of rationality that likes to think the traditional institutions are incompetent and if I just had the data I requested the answer would be trivial to discern.
A lot of the time the "proper historical data" doesn't exist.
Interesting article, as a Peruvian I'm quite familiar with Tupac Amaru II, and I've read Ollantay in high school.
This review was clearly meant for ME (/j)
Very good one. The idea of historical events as dramatic plays reminds me of Borges "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" https://ucrliteraryanalysis.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/theme-of-the-traitor-and-the-hero.pdf
"She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin."
What a hoot. Wayback int eh 1950's there was a female Peruvian singer whose stage name was Yma Sumac. From Wikipedia:
"Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo (born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo; September 13, 1922] – November 1, 2008), known as Yma Sumac (or Imma Sumack), was a Peruvian singer. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. ... Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yma_Sumac
She still had some popularity and her records were still around in the late 60s when I was in college, but I guess that she is completely unknown to younger people now.
I went on a Wikipedia binge about her a few weeks ago and was going to mention that here! For years I only knew of her as an occasionally entry in crossword puzzles. (Any three letter sequence that involves two vowels and a common consonant is going to show up a decent amount, even if Yoko Ono and Brian Eno are more common.) But I think I heard one of her songs on the radio and realized she had to be part of the inspiration for the opera singer in The Fifth Element.
Somehow my Wikipedia binge about her didn’t turn up this character from this play.
The conclusion reminds me of the painting "The Wild Chase" by Franz von Stuck, which shows Wotan charging on horseback, sword drawn, leading a procession of the unhallowed dead. What is intriguing is that Wotan looks suspiciously like Adolf Hitler, iconic hair and mustache as such. Conspiracy has it that Hitler saw this painting as a youth, and modeled himself after it.
And when the painting was drawn? 1889, the same year that Hitler was born
To be fair, the play is a comedy (they get married in the end), whereas in real life it's a tragedy (they die).
In general it's true we should all feel compelled to do our duty, for a life well lived, although those are some pretty dark examples in the end. I suppose karmic debt is personal, so who am I to say.
> This was a position designed to make the curaca identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of corregidor, it was also a way to get very rich.
Curacas didn't _get_ very rich. They were born rich. The position was usually hereditary.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curaca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuraka
> from a 1780 population of 1.2 million, 100,000 people were killed.
The source for the 100,000 figure appears to be "La oración de la tarde: novela escrita sobre el célebre drama del mismo titulo" written by Antonio Rotondo (page 326). At least that's what Wikipedia says: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebeli%C3%B3n_de_T%C3%BApac_Amaru_II
It's interesting that Rotondo says (translated from Spanish): "A pardon was immediately published, and the principal leaders of the insurrection having accepted it, the insurrection was suppressed, and thus the last sparks of the terrible uprising in Spanish South America were extinguished, in which more than 100,000 people perished, both rebels and loyalists". This seems to contradict the reviewer's statement that after the main battle "this was not so much a war as a series of massacres. Anybody who might conceivably offer resistance was killed". Does he/she have another source besides Rotondo? Is he/she talking about the time following the main battle yet before the pardon was issued?
Rotondo also says (translated from Spanish): "[the leading Spanish general Jose del Valle] finally managed to return with his depleted column to Cuzco, where he found that during his expedition the chief José Gabriel Tupac-Amaru, his wife, his two sons, an uncle, a brother-in-law and several relatives, all had been executed in the public square". This appears to contradict the reviewer's statement that "the general who led the Spanish army pronounced his opinion on what should happen to Túpac. This sentence was carried out".
Maybe these are just minor details, Rotondo was novelist not a historian after all. But then, why use him as a source at all? Unless there's a better source confirming the extraordinary 100,000 figure.
Interesting
Good writeup, very interesting.
"Don Antonio Valdez was a parish priest in Tinta,......Around 1775, he invited José Gabriel and some other honored guests to a performance of a play he had finished putting together. Set in Cuzco in the 1400s, Valdez told his assembled audience that Ollantay was a Castilian version of a Quechua play.4
After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,"
The most important thing for this reviews' sequence of events is how solid this claim is. If we know the future Tupac saw the play, that is actually a big deal. If the date of the play is actually nebulous and could have been after the rebellion, well that's a whole other thing.
I sent my digital servants to find out the truth of this matter, and the impression I got is that the idea that Tupac Amaru saw the play is on shaky foundation and is likely wrong, but the reviewer didn't completely make it up out of thin air:
"The primary basis for the claim comes from 19th-century writers. Sir Clements R. Markham (1910) reported that when he visited the parish of Laris near Cusco in 1853, he met Pablo Justiniani – an octogenarian priest “in direct descent from the Incas”. Justiniani told Markham that he had “the text of the drama of Ollantay” and recalled details of its recent history. Importantly, Justiniani recalled that the play had been performed at Tinta “before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru”, who was by then the leader of a rebellion. Markham notes: “it was acted before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru, a friend of [Antonio] Valdez, who headed an insurrection against the Spaniards in 1782”."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Incas_of_Peru/Chapter_10
And that's about it. And also there's this paper if you want something less fun and more serious: https://go-gale-com.translate.goog/ps/i.do?p=IFME&u=googlescholar&id=GALE%7CA197234128&v=2.1&it=r&sid=IFME&asid=7fefb114&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp