Gilman Hall 308

The Johns Hopkins Latin America in a Globalizing World works in progress seminar welcomes Alexis Hernando, Spanish Program, Modern Languages and Literatures, Johsn Hopkins University, to present:

Neo-Roman Republicanism at the ‘Genesis’ of a Transatlantic World: Good Government in Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala through John Milton

The following paper discusses the transatlantic exchange of the ‘Republican tradition’ in regard to nation and empire-building in Early Modern geopolitics and colonial policies. My intervention in the field consists of implicating Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno (1615) to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), specifically, in their conceptualization of “Good Government”. Concretely, I will argue that Guamán Poma’s critique of empire (both Incan and Spanish) draws on stoicism and neo-Roman concepts, in particular, a strain of neo-Roman thinking that gave a central place to the Biblical narrative of the Fall of Adam to define virtue and to recognize the origin of human vice and tyrannical government. Milton and the Milton scholarship help to frame this interpretation because they develop a similar strain of neo-Roman and Stoic ethics, which were critical of imperial expansion as well. 

“Please email Prof. Casey Lurtz ([email protected]) for a copy of the paper and the Zoom link.”