Room 4406

4:00-6:00pm

Reception to follow

In this talk Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia) puts Herman Melville in dialogue with El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the sixteenth-century chronicler of Inca history and the Spanish conquest of Peru, suggesting how particular knowledge of catastrophe has flowed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from south to north, creating alternatives to more familiar intellectual genealogies. Garcilaso’s influence on the Enlightenment helps explain the convergence of certain ideas about catastrophe and geography, a convergence that will become a structuring conceit of US-Americanness by the middle of the nineteenth century.